


Under The Blue Sky

by Nadin



Category: Jurassic Park (Movies), Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Adult Content, Angst, Anxiety, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Post-Movie(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unresolved Emotional Tension, probably nsfw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-27 11:56:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7617145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadin/pseuds/Nadin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Claire looked up at him, her eyes bright and lively, the singularity of her sea green gaze steadying him. “You’re back.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“As of 38 hours ago,” Owen confirmed, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, if only for the sake of not reaching out to brush her hair from her face, see if her skin was as smooth and soft as he remembered. </i>
</p><p>After the incident and a brief tour with the NAVY, Owen moves to Claire's home town, hoping to pick up the pieces of his broken life. He soon learns that it's easier said than done, and a secret Claire has been carrying since he left threatens to tear his world apart. Post-JW.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had this idea that I needed to get out of my system and I also have a ton of prompts in my inbox, so I'll try to maybe incorporate one or two of them into this story. It’ll be 2-3 chapters long, nothing crazy - I’m still figuring out some details. 
> 
> Also, I’m not sure how to add a warning without giving away the main plot point of the story, so... It might get emotional. Or maybe it’s just me. 
> 
> Enjoy!

_“Thought you might want this.”_

_Karen put a cup of tea on the coffee table in front of Claire who was curled up on the couch._

_“Thanks,” Claire nodded, offering her sister a weak, grateful smile, but made no attempt to reach for the drink. She looked away instead, her gaze sliding unseeingly past Karen._

_“Scooch over,” Karen instructed, and then plopped down when Claire drew her knees closer to her chest. She pulled a blanket over both of them and placed a reassuring hand on Claire’s ankle. “You doing okay?”_

_Her arm folded under her head like a pillow, Claire peered at her sister across endless expanse of cozy plaid stretching between them. “I’m fine,” she said without much conviction. “You don’t have to… babysit me.”_

_Karen snorted. “Please! Babysitting implies screaming and a mess in the kitchen. This is a piece of cake.”_

_Above them, the pipes rumbled to life, spewing waves of warm air through the vents. They both glanced up at the same time._

_“I’m good, really. I’ll just… it’s like a cold, right? In a couple of days I won’t even remember it happened.” Claire’s voice cracked a little and she trailed off._

_“But it’s not a cold. It’s--”_

_“Let’s just watch something, okay?” She picked up the remote and flicked the TV on before Karen could protest, choosing to ignore a heavy sigh that followed._

_She flipped through a few channels, not sure what she was looking for, until an old James Stewart film popped up on the screen, all faded colours and excessive makeup. Comfort in familiarity, as her mother used to say._

_After a few minutes, Karen sank deeper into the cushions and pulled Claire’s legs over her lap, her eyes fixed on Grace Kelly’s character who was wearing a poodle skirt and flirting shamelessly. It wasn’t until the credits started to roll an hour later that she noticed that Claire fell asleep somewhere along the way, and that the movie had been running on mute this whole time._

\---

December in Wisconsin turned out to be exactly the way Owen imagined it – chilly winds trying to sneak under his clothes no matter how many layers he was wearing, bright sunny days with the sky so blue over his head it hurt to look at it, cold air nipping at his cheeks and nose, making his eyes water. He had never seen this much snow in his life – didn’t even know there could be this much snow in one place. Mountains of it. Sometimes he thought that his house was a fortress surrounded by tall and endless walls of white.

It felt a little bit like survival, but in a good way. The kind of way when he was more worried about starting his car in the morning instead of thinking he might not make it through the day alive. After the scorching heat, the cold hit him hard, knocking the air out of him in a heartbeat, making him realize he’d been on the run for so long he no longer knew how to stop. And maybe it was time to learn.

Owen shook the snow off his heavy boots and stepped into _Smiley Pancake_ diner, his skin starting to burn from being in the warmth after a 10-minute walk that, under less fortunate circumstances, could’ve left him with frost-bitten fingers and toes.

The heat in his house had been acting up since last night, and this morning, instead of calling about having it checked and after failing to find a proper sweater in the boxes piled up in the living room, he jogged here, certain that there was a plate of waffles with his name on it somewhere in this town and determined to find it. That, and the fact that his fridge was empty.

The place was only half-full after the breakfast crowd had thinned out and lunch was still a couple of hours away. And it took him a half a minute to realize that the first thing his eyes went to was the menu board above the counter with specials written in chalk and not the back door – after the park, Owen developed a habit of checking every room he’d step into for a safe escape route. One that was hard to break.

Although he had to admit that not going into a full combat mode whenever someone would drop a fork or laugh loudly was his biggest accomplishment. And it felt good. Almost as good as knowing that even though this newly acquired sense of safety didn’t protect him from still having nightmares at least twice a week, it somehow helped keep them at bay.

“Owen!”

Someone barreled into him, nearly knocking him down and instantly sending his heart into a wild race – from 0 to 120 in under a second.

His arms closed instinctively around a much smaller body, and the next moment his lips stretched into a wide grin when he recognized a familiar sandy mop of Gray Mitchell’s hair – nearly reaching his chin already. The relief that washed over him was so strong he couldn’t help but let out a bark of a laugh, genuinely delighted to see the boy.

“Hey, buddy,” Owen greeted him, slapping Gray on the shoulder and stepping back to give him a proper look.

It had been a while since the last time they met, and Gray had changed – not significantly, but also not just in size. Owen couldn’t quite put his finger on what was new, though. Not that it needed to be defined, he thought. It was good to know that Gray’s ever-present excitement was still intact, threatening to spill over the edge and drown them both. He was practically bouncing with glee, and the familiar comfort of it shifted something in Owen, making him feel like some loose parts inside of him finally clicked into place.

“You’re back!”

“I sure am,” Owen confirmed. It shouldn’t have been such a shock, logically speaking. Madison wasn’t exactly New York City. He didn’t live here long enough to know for a fact that everyone in this place knew everyone else, but he wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was true. In fact, it was a miracle he didn’t run into the ten people he was acquainted with sooner. “You here with your mom?” His eyes took in the occupants of the vinyl booths lining the windows to his left, but didn’t spot Karen.

“No,” Gray shook his head and turned to the counter. “Aunt Claire. She’s buying us hot chocolate. ”

Owen’s heart made a flip in his ribcage as he followed Gray’s gaze, his chest tightening.

He saw her a moment before she saw him – dressed in jeans and light-pink sweater that was a couple of sizes too big, with a scarf wrapped loosely around her neck, Claire was standing in line, waiting to pay for her order. Her hair was longer than he remembered and she was wearing it in a sloppy braid today, with a cloud is curling wisps framing her face.

She nodded and smiled at the cashier before handing him her credit card, and then she turned, her eyes scanning the room briefly before landing on Gray. And then on Owen. Her small smile, light and easy just a second ago, froze on her face. She might have as well seen a ghost – a feeling that resonated deeply with Owen.

“Aunt Claire, look who’s here!” Gray announced as she approached them with two cups of – supposedly – hot chocolate, a coat draped over her arm. “Owen!”

“I… can see that,” she said in a thin voice and handed the boy his drink, avoiding looking at Owen for as long as she could – who knew that putting a credit card back into a wallet could be such a long and complicated process? At last, she looked up at him, her eyes bright and lively, the singularity of her sea green gaze steadying him. “You’re back.”

“As of 38 hours ago,” Owen confirmed, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, if only for the sake of not reaching out to brush her hair from her face, see if her skin was as smooth and soft as he remembered. “Still unpacking.”

She nodded, not quite sure what to say next. Was there a protocol or something for this kind of situations? She added some wattage to her smile that felt plastic and fake and like it was going to split her face in half when Gray’s brows knitted together ever so slightly at the sight of their awkward interaction. Damn kid was too smart for his own good.

“We’re going to the movies,” Gray said to Owen when a few moments passed and no one said anything. “Want to come with us?” And then, “Can he, Aunt Claire?”

Claire’s hand landed on his shoulder. “You heard Owen, honey. He’s busy. With… boxes and all. He’s probably jetlagged, too.”

Gray whipped his head around, clearly disappointed but not willing to let it go just yet. “Maybe we could help with that?” He offered hopefully, his face lighting up.

“But we have tickets,” she reasoned with him. “And you wanted to see this _Stars Battle_ movie for so long, remember?”

“It’s _Star Wars_ ,” he corrects her automatically, not at all perplexed by her lack of knowledge of the present-day pop culture.

“Tell you what,” Owen said quickly, giving Gray that look like they were two conspirators speaking some secret guy language, suddenly aware of not being able to look directly at Claire as well, “I’ll call your mom and we’ll figure something out. Sounds good?”

Relieved, Gray nodded enthusiastically. Owen smirked and ruffled his hair, and this was set.

It did rub him the wrong way that Claire was so blatantly against his company she didn’t even bother hiding it, and for a moment, he was oh so tempted to say yes just for the hell of it. Just so he could see her face when he confirmed that he was free and more than happy to join them, even though she was right and he was so jetlagged that his brain hurt. The problem was, Owen wasn’t sure who he would be punishing by agreeing to go.

As Claire pulled on her coat, a whiff of her perfume reaching him from a few feet away and wrapping around him like a cloud, Gray talked a mile a minute, dumping six-months’ worth of news on Owen as if his life depended on it and making him promise once again that they would hang out soon. And then Owen watched them file out of the door and into the freezing Saturday morning, the wind instantly picking up Claire’s hair and whipping it in her face.

She paused on the sidewalk and pulled Gray’s hat lower over his ears in that habitual, comfortable manner that implied that the two were spending quite a lot of time together. Her glance darted quickly toward the window, locking with Owen’s on the other side of the glass for a split second, and in this surreal moment it almost felt like he imagined it, but then Gray turned to him as well and gave him a quick wave before they started toward parking lot.

No longer hungry and feeling slightly nauseated, Owen stayed inside long enough to make sure they drove off before pulling the door open and walking out of the diner to head back home, his stomach churning. It hadn’t even been two days yet, and he already had no idea how he was going to make it through the next week-month-year, knowing that bumping into Claire was more probable than not, and not quite sure how he was supposed to deal with it.

\---

“And you said yes?!”

“What was I supposed to do, Claire?” Karen exclaimed defensively. “Scott hasn’t exactly been a father of the year, and I’m not stupid. I know I’m not enough sometimes.” Her voice softened. “The boys adore Owen. And after everything they’ve been through, I couldn’t deny them this small indulgence.”

Claire huffed with exasperation. Trust her sister to leave no room for argument. It wasn’t like she was wrong, too. Zach and Gray _worshiped_ Owen, and even though Karen insisted they attend a few therapy sessions after the incident to talk through the worst of their experiences, Claire was also well aware that if there were some unresolved issues left, Owen was the person they could share them with if they needed someone to talk to. Someone who really understood. Someone who wasn't their mother, or their aunt who was about as in control of her life as a tiny boat was in control of a stormy sea.

It would be ridiculous and selfish to not let the boys see him, and what right did Claire have to decide this, anyway?

And yet…

In the five days since they ran into each other, she managed to calm down ( _So what if he was back? It wasn’t like they’d have to see each other every day!_ ) and then work herself up into a jittery nervousness again ( _Because she did NOT see it coming, and now her stomach was in knots at the very thought of him living somewhere in this city and maybe buying coffee in her favourite coffee shop and picking up groceries at the same store she always went to_ ), until she ended up in her sister’s kitchen only to find out that she _just_ missed Owen who took Zach and Gray to see a game. Frankly, she didn’t even think he’d actually call Karen. Certainly not this soon, and now she was having a really hard time processing this situation.

“It’s not like _you_ have to be involved,” Karen pointed out after a few moments of silence, and added meaningfully, “Unless you want to.”

“I don’t,” Claire blurted out quickly, her hands clasping tightly around the coffee mug. “Honestly, Karen. It’s not like I don’t have a life to speak of…”

“Watching reruns of _The Dick van Dyke Show_ every night does not qualify as having a life,” her sister snorted.

“It’s a good show,” Claire protested. “And it’s…” She cleared her throat. _It’s the only thing that keeps me sane sometimes_. But she knew better than to say it out loud. Karen finally dropped the therapy subject after a few months of bugging her about setting up an appointment, and Claire wasn’t sure it was smart to jump back into this shit-storm again. “It’s none of my business, really. This whole Owen situation. You do what you think is the right thing to do.”  

Karen regarded her skeptically, but then she let out an exasperated sigh and shook her head. “Did you at least talk?”

“Of course, we talked. _Hey, how are you? Bye_. The whole shebang.”  She made a face. 

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” Claire admitted. “And no. And we will not. I mean…”

“Seriously, Claire, what are you? Twelve?”

“If I were twelve, I’d throw a tantrum and lock myself in my room,” she scoffed. "And that would be it." 

“But he needs to--”

“Start a new life. Like I did,” Claire cut her off.

“He moved here for you,” Karen raised her hands up in surrender in case her sister decided to throw a saucer at her.

“And then he left.”

“And then he came back.”

“Probably because his lease isn’t over,” Claire countered.

It felt like they were playing ping-pong, but the game was impossible to follow, the words bouncing off the walls and echoing in the corners, and in the end, they both lost.

“I didn’t ask him to do any of this, okay? Can we not talk about it? I get it that Owen’s return is fresh news, but…” Claire ran her hand through her hair, then picked up their cups and carried them to the sink if only to have something to do when Karen’s scrutiny grew too unbearable. Restless and antsy, she was a stone’s throw away from pacing, or better yet – running a marathon or something. “I don’t know how I feel about it.” She turned around and leaned against the counter. “Happy?”

“Claire…”

“Or maybe I do know. I feel miserable, probably.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “To be honest, I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. Not like this. So if we could just _please_ discuss something else. Anything, really. Weather, politics, that horrible rug you bought for the living room. What were you thinking?”

“I like it,” Karen insisted heatedly, and rolled her eyes as Claire snickered, incredulous. But then her face softened, her eyes studying Claire in that way that Claire always found unnerving. Like she was trying to see right through her, and it was working. “I just want you to know that you don’t have to do that thing you always do when things get complicated.”

Claire scowled at her. “What thing?”

“That thing when you push everyone away and then barricade yourself in your house, and the next thing we know, you’re on the island and we don’t see you for a decade.”

That earned her a rueful chuckle. “Yeah, well, look how _that_ worked out.”

\---

Claire’s disillusionment about her ability to breeze through the Jurassic World incident with flying colours hit a brick wall two weeks after their return to the States when she found herself hyperventilating and on the verge of tears in the frozen food section in a supermarket three blocks away from her house. As she waited for Owen to come pick her up, it finally occurred to her that, perhaps, denial was not the best strategy as far as dealing with the trauma was concerned, and that maybe she needed a change.

If Karen was surprised to find out that Claire was coming to Madison, she didn’t show it.

“I’m not _coming back_ ,” Claire insisted, shivering in the jacket that was five layers too thin for the Wisconsin winter as they stepped through the airport doors and into the grey afternoon. “It’s just for a few weeks.”

Without a comment, Karen grabbed the handle of one of Claire’s suitcases and steered her toward the car.

They hadn’t talked much since that brief moment at the hangar on Isla Nublar – party because there hardly ever was any time for that, and partly because neither one of them knew what to say. The initial relief over finding her children alive and well, if a little spooked, was replaced by numerous mental images of what might have happened, or could have happened, or _would_ have happened had it not been for small moments of sheer luck, and the way Karen would sometimes only half-look at her told Claire everything she needed to know.

Staying at the Mitchells’ house was out of the question – not just because of her sister’s watered down cold shoulder, but also because the whole point of coming home was to have some space, and being crammed in a small house with three other people, two of whom nearly got killed on her watch, was too much for Claire to handle.

Her parents’ house was cold and looked abandoned, even though Claire knew that Karen was keeping an eye on it. She tried to remember the last time she was here, but after all the years she spent on the island, this other life felt unreal and out of reach. And she was so tired…

Owen showed up on her doorstep a couple of weeks later when it became clear that this was a bit more than just a break from the sunny California, and before she knew it, she was emptying a drawer for him and rearranging hangers in her closet to accommodate his stuff.

Oddly enough, their messy situation was somehow the only normal thing in her chaotic life at the time.

\---

Claire stopped at the red light just as a dark SUV pulled up to a McDonald’s across the street from her. It took her a moment to realize that the car looked familiar, and another one – to figure out _whose_ it was.

From her spot, she saw Owen, Zach and Gray pile out of it, identical scarves hanging around their necks and a giant foam glove perched on Gray’s hand. Her heart tripped over itself as her fingers squeezed the steering wheel so tight her knuckles turned white. Another moment, and she would’ve probably left indentations on the plastic.

In the light spilling out through the large windows, she watched them step into the café and had to remind herself to breath – in, out, repeat. It was a weird feeling, both familiar and new at the same time. The one she didn’t know what to make of – seeing Owen again was like picking up a book she’d started but never finished only to find out that someone ripped out the last pages and there was no way to know how it ended.

The light changed to green and a car behind hers honked impatiently, making Claire step quickly on the gas just as Owen paused in the doorway and turned to see what the commotion was about. She turned right before he spotted her, grateful for the cover of the darkness that fell over the city shortly after lunch – something she never appreciated before.

It wasn’t until she got home that she finally understood what was wrong – before, Owen’s proximity was justified either by their work or their relationship. Knowing that not only they existed in the same universe but also that he lived in the same city as she without being connected to her one way or another was unsettling and out of place. It threw her off and now she had no idea how to find the solid ground again.  

\---

It was easy to slip into a routine, comforting even.

Unsurprisingly, the job market in Madison, Wisconsin, wasn’t tailored to accommodate people whose only solid skills, aside from wielding every type of known firearms, were limited to making dinosaurs jump on command and tracking animals in the wild.

As a result, Owen took to running in the morning, despite the subzero temperatures, to take the edge off the stress of the civilian life and divided the rest of his time between fixing up his house and working part-time at the local animal shelter until something better turned up. Usually, he would already be at home by the time Zach and Gray were out of school, and more often than not they would swing by his place on their way home to grab a grilled cheese sandwich and play a video game or two, adding small moments of normalcy to his life.

“Shouldn’t you be at school?” Owen asked when he came back home from his shift one day and Zach was already parked on the couch in the living room with a can of Coke and _Call of Duty_.

The boy shrugged dismissively. “There’s only a week left until Christmas break,” he noted without looking away from the TV, his fingers moving quickly on the controller. “Nothing’s going on there anyway.”

Owen shook off his parka and rubbed his hands together to get warm. “That wasn’t the deal,” he pointed out, his voice slightly less stern than he intended. Both Zach and Gray knew where he kept a spare key, but he made it perfectly clear they could only use it so they wouldn’t freeze to death on his porch, not to skip school. And yet, there they were.

“It’s just one day,” Zach mumbled. “And I only missed history. I mean, it’s not like it’s going anywhere. It’s, like, already done.”

Owen scrubbed his chin, torn between giving him a lecture – which he had no idea how to do – and calling Karen, which would probably mean trouble. In the end, he went to the kitchen to grab root beer from the fridge before returning to the living room, still undecided about how to proceed.

And it was then that he saw it – a swelling bruise on Zach’s right cheekbone, purple and nasty-looking, and probably painful.

Owen’s eyebrows pulled together. “What happened?” He demanded, and this time Zach looked at him, if a little hesitantly.

“Nothing,” he shook his head. “Just… Nothing.”

Owen sat down next to him. “Wait, did they _send_ you home?”

The boy’s lips twitched humorlessly. “No, I left before they could do it. And before they called mom.”

“Okay,” Owen said slowly, running a hand down his face. They probably did all Karen by now. It did not sound good. “Spill.”

Finally, Zach hit the pause and dropped the controller on the coffee table, his glance fixed on a stack of coasters sitting next to a few year-old magazines. “Some moron said something he shouldn’t have said,” he explained reluctantly. “He was basically asking for it, so....” Another shrug.

Owen leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees, and studied the boy’s face. Maybe he needed to fetch a bag of frozen carrots for him or something. “It’s not a reason to go around and hit people, Zach. If it were, we’d all be in real shit. All the time.”

“Yeah, well, you would’ve done the same thing.”

Owen’s eyes narrowed, although he couldn’t bring himself to disagree. So much for trying to be a decent role model. “So this guy… did he say something about _you_? Or someone else?” And then a metaphorical light bulb went on above his head. “Was that about a _girl_?”

“Ew, no!” Zach winced, visibly disgusted. He shook his head. “Well, sort of. But… not like that, okay? Can we drop it?”

Owen leaned back against the cushions and took a long swig of his root beer. “We can’t, actually. If your mom comes pounding on my door anytime soon, I’d love to know why.”

 Zach huffed with frustration and linked his fingers together, staring down at his hands for a long moment. “It’s Aunt Claire.”

At that, Owen’s stiffened momentarily, all the blood in his body rushing up to his head and starting to hammer in his temples, making him feel dizzy. He could count the number of times either of the Mitchell brothers mentioned Claire in front on him in the past few weeks on the fingers of one hand, and usually it was in passing. Each time they changed the subject fast, but Owen was too busy wallowing in his self-pity to be bothered by it.

Actually talking about her, on purpose, felt surreal.

“What about her?” He asked slowly, his throat tight and dry.

“I thought it was over already,” Zach glanced at him, his expression weary. “The whole park crap. But it’s been a year - I mean, it will be in a few days, and apparently some channel ran a program about it last night.” He let out a long breath. “Have you seen it?”

“I don’t really… I don’t watch the news.”

“Well, neither do it,” the boy grimaced. “But other people do. Shocker, I know. So this one jerk walked up to me today and said something about how it was all Claire’s fault it happened and asked how we sleep at night and some other crap.” He pursed his lips together, visibly fuming now.

“Jesus…”

It was a torture to watch Claire go through this stuff a year ago, her eyes haunted and scared and so exhausted he wanted to start punching walls. But it never really occurred to Owen that on top of living through the I-Rex massacre, Zach and Gray also had to face the social consequences of it. Not only were they the survivors, but their aunt was directly involved with the park. Owen couldn’t believe they never talked about this before, kicking himself mentally for not thinking of it sooner.

“Like, will they ever get tired of this shit?” Zach asked quietly.

“Eventually.” Owen mumbled, not as convinced as he wanted to be. “And so you just punched him?”

Zach snorted dryly, his gaze dropped down to his reddened knuckles. “What choice did I have?”

Owen’s lips curved into a small smile and he put his root beer on the coffee table, meeting Zach’s eyes again. “For the record, it was a bad thing to do and you should never do it again. Whatever the reason.” In the hallway, the doorknob turned with a soft creak, reminding him that he needed to oil it, and Gray tumbled in, announcing his arrival by calling out Owen’s name. So Owen leaned closer to Zach, dropped his voice and added quickly before the younger Mitchell stormed into the living room, “But _off_ the record, and I’ll kill you if you tell your mom I said that – good job and yes, I would’ve done the same thing.”

A grin spread across Zach’s face. “Totally, right?”

“Whoa!” Gray’s eyes widened at the sight of his brother’s black eye. “Mom’s gonna kill you.”

Chuckling, Owen got up from the couch, ruffing Gray’s hair on his way to the kitchen. “You guys hungry?”

He fixed some sandwiches and chips for them, allowing them to stay over half an hour longer than usual on a school night, all three of them taking turns in killing zombies and fighting for the world peace or whatever. He gave Zach an ice pack for his face and then busied himself with fixing the pipes under the kitchen sink that had been making some weird noises lately while the boys argued loudly over something or another in the living room.

He made a mental note to watch the 9 o’clock special tonight to see for himself how bad it was. The fact that the anniversary of the incident was looming before them somehow escaped him, what with trying to piece his life back together. But now it really hit him, and his mind was abuzz and wired.

His hands itched to pick up the phone and call Claire to see how she was doing. But theirs wasn’t this kind of relationship, and he knew for a fact he wouldn’t be able to say a word even if he found it in him to dial her number. What if she just needed to be left alone? What if she saw his name and chose not to pick up?

“You need a lift?” He asked when the boys shuffled into the hallway and reached for their coats sometime around 6.30.

“Nah,” Zach said. “It’s only four blocks.”

“And Zach hopes that the cold will make this,” Gray pointed at his brother’s bruise, “look better.”

“Well, maybe it will,” Zach glowered at him and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket.

“That’s not how it works, genius.”

“You be careful there,” Owen interjected before the banter escalated into another fight. “It’s slippery. And, um…” His gaze darted quickly toward Zach before wandering aimlessly around the hallway. He cleared his throat. “Take care of your aunt, okay?”

“She’s fine,” Gray assured him absently while trying to fix the scarf that seemed to be a mile long around his neck. “I mean, her job’s great…”

“Hat,” Zach told him.

“...and she comes over a lot and stuff,” Gay continued without missing a beat. “Which is really cool. And she’s no longer sad about the baby.”

Until now, Owen didn’t even know that a word could feel like a sucker punch. The blood drained form his face and his heart dropped into his stomach. For a long moment, he forgot how to breathe as Gray’s response ran on an endless loop in his head till he couldn’t bear it any longer.

“What baby?” He mouthed in a barely audible whisper, hoping as hell it wasn’t what he really heard.

“Dude!” Zach hissed, smacking Gray on the arm.

Gray looked up slowly, horrified and guilty. “Oops.”

**To be continued...**


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, this story was supposed to be a 2k one-shot. Now I'm looking at about 4 chapters ~5k each. It's so out of control... 
> 
> I had quite a lot of fun (in a very non-fun way) writing this part, and I hope it won't disappoint. As per usual, feedback is always appreciated :)

_Owen filled a tall glass with cold tap water and chugged it down, and then leaned heavily against the kitchen sink. His heart was pounding fast, making him feel sick, his skin clammy and too tight over his bones somehow. He closed his eyes and counted to five, slowly, and then to ten, until his chest no longer felt like it was gripped in a tight vice._

_The kitchen was cold even with the heating turned up, the whole house drafty, but he still was uncomfortably hot as though his blood was on fire, and, as he finally straightened up and walked over to the window overlooking the backyard, the ice-cold tiled floor felt soothing beneath his bare feet._

_He cradled empty glass to his chest and exhaled slowly, struggling to keep the panic at bay, his mind reeling._

_“Owen?”_

_He jerked his head up. Dressed in his shirt, its long sleeves falling over her wrists and hanging at her thighs, Claire blinked at him sleepily from the doorway. The corner of his mouth lifted at the sight of her, her mere presence calming the storm inside of him. She rubbed her eyes, stifling a yawn, and padded soundlessly toward him across the kitchen. Her arms slipped around his waist and she nestled her forehead between his shoulder-blades._

_“What are you doing here?” Claire murmured against his bare skin._

_Owen put the glass down on the windowsill and clasped his hands around her wrists. “It’s snowing.” His lips curved into a wondrous smile as his gaze skimmed over the write blanket spreading across the lawn and an old picnic table, over the slow dance of nickel-sized snowflakes, twirling in the air._

_She let out a desperate half-laugh. “It’s been snowing almost non-stop for the past two months. Thought you’d be sick of it by now.”_

_He lifted his arm and she stepped around him, allowing him to pull her into his side. “How can you ever get sick of it?” He muttered, pressing his lips to her mussed hair._

_“Come back to bed,” Claire asked quietly, planting a soft kiss on his shoulder, his collarbone, on the hollow of his neck, her eyelashes fluttering against his skin. “Please.”_

_“Yeah, I just…” he glanced down. “I just needed a drink of water.”_

_“I can’t sleep without you,” she said, her forehead pressed to his chest._

_Owen pecked the top of her head again, then dropped his arm and found her hand, tugging her toward the stairs. She climbed into bed first, moving to what by unspoken agreement was now considered her side, and he slipped under the covers behind her, arm wrapped around Claire’s waist. He nuzzled her hair and let out a long breath, folding his whole body around hers, holding on to her for his own comfort as well as hers._

_“Better now?”_

_Claire rolled over to face him, warm and sleepy and real. “Much. You okay?”_

_He drew her closer until she was nearly sprawled over him, her head tucked under his chin. “I am now.”_

_He wanted to tell her everything. About how he woke up to the scent of jungle and blood hanging in the warm, humid air and his shins burning from the sprint across the endless forest, and his body so wound up he feared it might explode. About how his senses mistook her deep breathing in the night for the labored exhales of the prehistoric monsters hiding in the dark. About how much it scared him that he could have so easily hurt her if his instincts dimmed his awareness and took over his mind._

_He also wanted to ask her if she was feeling it too - the distance growing between. If she knew that she was pushing him away, more and more with each passing day. Was it his fault? Hers? Anyone’s? Did she even know it was happening?_

_He’d heard her cry in the bathroom the other night, but she refused to speak about it when he asked, her eyes skittering around and not meeting his. The silences around them were getting longer and heavier, towering over them like walls, thick and almost palpable to the touch. Impenetrable. It felt like there was no way around it, and the big, black nothing that settled over them was getting so loud he wanted to scream._

_Owen stroked her hair, threading his fingers through the soft waves, breathing in the scent of her shampoo, and laundry detergent, and her skin – everything he grew to associate with Claire, his chest constricting in fear._

_It was only in the moments like this that everything felt right and they were both whole and complete and here. But it wasn’t enough. He had no idea where they were standing, and where they were going. Or what they were supposed to do if it turned out they were headed in different directions._

\---

“ _You look weird_ ,” Lowery said, his face grainy on the screen of Claire’s laptop.

She plopped down into the chair and regarded him rather grimly over the rim of her teacup as the light of a desk lamp reflected in her reading glasses, not sure if she was up for spilling the beans or if blaming her ‘weird’ look on a headache would do.

Lowery quit Masrani Global about the same time she did – a few months after the incident, although he was still living in San Diego and, as far as Claire was aware, was now seeing someone from Accounting or PR.

The company was more than willing to accommodate her relocation to Midwest after she turned down their offer to maybe settle in New York instead. They couldn’t fire her because they couldn’t replace her, and they needed her for damage control – they needed Claire more than she needed them, and she refused to feel bad about using it to her advantage.

And then she was out the door, metaphorically speaking, the moment the word ‘reopening’ first came up during a conference call, and it dawned on her that not only did they think it was a good idea but also that she’d simply slip into her old role when the time came, no questions asked.

She sent in her resignation notice an hour later.

Claire was only a small wheel in a gigantic corporate machine and there was nothing she could’ve done to stop a new park from happening, but at the time, not being a part of it felt enough.

By whatever coincidence, that happened when she and Owen stopped being a thing as well, and she took it as a sign to try and move on at last.

Her new office was 15 times smaller and her new position 15 levels lower than the one she had in Masrani Global, and it all came with the hours 15 times more comfortable. She would still wonder on occasion if this was something she really wanted, or if it was a natural progression of having to deal with a traumatic experience that she didn’t manage to sweep under the rug. Did everyone else just bounce back to their old lives or were they feeling as helpless as she did, fumbling for the new normal?

“Weird day,” Claire shook her head, taking a sip of her tea.

Aside from Owen, Lowery was the only person she stayed in touch with after the park, and he was probably her only friend who wasn’t a member of her family. She’d find it ironic if she gave herself a chance to dwell on it, perhaps, but she tried not to.

“ _The company is planning a memorial service_ ,” he told her gravely, lowering his voice as if it was a secret he didn’t want anyone to overhear.

“I know,” Claire nodded. “They sent me an invitation.”

He seemed surprised by it. “ _Are you coming?_ ”

“I would, but I tore it into confetti,” she replied dryly. “Are you?”

“ _Not sure I have a choice. The whole town will probably be one big party_.”

A pang of guilt jolted through her, settling heavily in the pit of her stomach.

Claire stopped following the news about Jurassic World and Lowery had long given up on trying to share scraps of information he had about the matter, but it still hurt, even though she tried to pretend that it didn’t.

A year ago, she had to personally sign hundreds of letters expressing her _sincerest condolences_ to the families of the deceased. A part of her hoped that saying _I’m sorry_ as many times as she did would make it easier, but if anything, it only made everything worse. It was as if she sealed a part of herself in each envelope that went through her desk, tearing her very essence piece by piece until there was nothing left.

So much for moving on.

“I don’t think it qualifies as a party,” she pointed out.

He shrugged, “ _I don’t think anyone would care_.”

“It could’ve been worse,” she muttered. “This memorial could’ve been for us.”

“ _Ever the optimist_ ,” Lowery’s lips twitched wryly.

He was wearing a Superman t-shirt, and Claire was tempted to ask whether it had anything to do with his girlfriend, or the latest movie he saw, of if it was his personal _Screw you!_ to having to put up with the dress code five days a week, which she knew he hated.

A doorbell gave her a start just as she was about to make an off-hand comment about his never-changing fashion choices. She whipped her head around, her brows pulling together.

“Can we talk later?” She turned to Lowery again. “Someone’s at the door and I have to… It’s probably an insurance agent or something.”

“ _Tell them where you used to work_ ,” he suggested, pushing his glasses further up his nose. “ _They’ll leave you alone right off_.”

She didn’t think it was an insurance agent, really. Not at this hour. But it could’ve been Karen, or one of the boys – they took to dropping by now and then once she’d settled in and stopped ignoring her sister’s phone calls under the pretense of needing time, and Claire had to admit that she didn’t mind it as much as she thought she would. Or as much as she’d expect her old self to. 

It wasn’t either of them, though.

“Is it true?” Owen asked the moment she pulled the door open without so much as a hello. In the pale glow of the porch light over his head, his face looked ashen.

Claire’s senses tunneled, her pulse humming somewhere in her throat. Ever since his return, he made no attempt to contact her or acknowledge her existence, not after their encounter at the diner, and the fact that he was standing at her door on a freezing night, looking like she was supposed to know what he was talking about caught her off guard.

“Is what true?” She asked slowly as a swarm of possibilities rushed through her mind.

“That you were pregnant.”

The words fell heavily between them, crushing whatever armor she had into dust.

Claire clutched the doorknob to steady herself, willing her knees not to give in.

“How do you… Who told you?” A surge of adrenaline bolted through her. “Karen…”

“So, it’s true,” Owen breathed out, looking hurt, confused, angry. And shocked, most of all.

He pushed past her into the house, and Claire shut the door behind him, feeling lightheaded, her heart thudding hollowly in her chest, seemingly taking up all the space inside of her body.

For a long moment, they stared at one another in stunned silence, Owen’s chest heaving like he’d jogged all the way here even though his car was in her driveway and he wasn’t even wearing a coat over his sweatshirt.

He could use a haircut, Claire noted absently, allowing herself to take him in, although she liked the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck and his forehead. He looked tanner than just about everyone else in Wisconsin at this time of the year, and the lines around his eyes were deeper than she remembered. Then again, it could have just been the lighting—

And it was so much easier to think of all of this than about what he really came here to discuss.

“What happened?” Owen asked at last, his voice hoarse. He looked her up and down as though in search for… What?

Claire exhaled sharply as if it only now occurred to her that she needed to keep breathing. “Nothing.”

“Claire…”

She squeezed past him, all but sucking in her stomach lest they touch by accident, and headed for the living room if only to put some distance between them, to escape the questions he didn’t know how to ask and the unmasked pain and betrayal in his eyes that echoed in every cell of her body.

For a split second, her hand landed habitually on her stomach but Claire dropped in and turned to Owen hovering in the doorway. Her shoulders slouched helplessly.

“Nothing happened,” she repeated, straining to keep her voice firm and strong – everything that she wasn’t.

“I just want to know the truth.” He didn’t move, didn’t make any attempt to approach her, nearly angling away from her like she was a time bomb that could go off any moment. “Was it… mine?”

Claire’s lips twisted into a small, humorless smile that slipped off her face as soon as it appeared. She looked away and shook her head. “I… need a moment to decide if I should be insulted by this question.”

Owen flinched. “Okay, so--” He started, prompting her to continue.

She met his eyes. “I didn’t keep it. I couldn’t…” A shaky breath escaped her chest, making her wish she could fold in on herself and disappear altogether.

He paled visibly, the reality of this conversation finally catching up with him, hitting him with the blunt force of an oncoming train. “So you just…?”

“What do you want me to say, Owen?” She demanded defensively, uncertain of who she was angrier at – him or herself. “You wanted the truth…”

His eyes darkened, his jaw clenched. “This decision…. It wasn’t only yours to make.”

Claire bristled at the accusation his words were laced with. “Then whose was it?”

“I had the right to know.” And just liked that, he was across the room and in her face, his gaze boring into her with such intensity Claire feared she might crumble over and shatter.

“And you would have,” she responded, struggling to sound calm, reasonable, even though she was feeling anything but. “If I knew where to find you.” She crossed her arms over her chest and raised her chin stubbornly, refusing to look defiant. “It wasn’t like you left a forwarding address. And we’re not talking about a different time zone here – I didn’t even know what continent you were on or when you were coming back. _If_ you were coming back.” She paused to allow her words to sink in.

"Of course, I was going to come back! I've _been_ back, for _weeks_ ," he pressed. "How come I had to learn that you were pregnant with my child by accident?"

"Because I _couldn't_ , Owen!" Her voice cracked, sounding almost hysterical. “And… It wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.”

Owen stared at her, half outraged, half disbelieving. “How can you say that?”

There probably was a way to handle with situation with grace, but if that was the case, she didn’t have it in her to go for it.

It felt wrong and unfair to lash out at him because _she_ was hurting and it was too much, but Claire didn’t know how to stop now. Didn’t want to either - because the fear and pain never went away, and her guilt and shame were so overwhelming they threatened to snap her in half. Six months ago, it was just her and the weight of the impossible decision she had no choice but to make, and now he had the _audacity_ to accuse her of not keeping him in the loop?

“So what exactly would you have done if you knew?” She demanded. “Would you have _forced_ me to have that baby?”

The questioned rendered him dumbfounded.

Owen swore under his breath. “Jesus, Claire,” he ran his hand through his hair. “Of course, not!”  

“Then what are we talking about?” She pursed her lips together, took a steadying breath, a panicked flurry beating in her chest. “It was a time-sensitive matter--”

“And so you decided that it was easier--” He exploded.

“Easier?!” She cut him off, trembling with anger now, her cheeks burning. “You really think it was _easy_?”

“You make it sound that way,” Owen snapped. “It was my baby, too! You had no right--”

“You weren’t even here!” She yelled, her eyes blazing, impossibly green and wild, her hair glowing like a fiery halo in the soft light of the overhead lamp. “We were broken up. What right are you talking about?”

His gaze was hard, unapologetic. “I loved you,” he said slowly, punctuating each word that landed on Claire like a blow. “And you ended it, Claire. And then you just went and--”

The usually comforting warmth of her house was stifling now. She pushed away from him, so outraged by the second that she was seeing red, her chest tight and her lungs crumpled. It hurt as much as on the day when she finally decided what she was going to do, except this time, it wasn’t just her blaming herself for not being able to go through with the whole thing. This time, she could _feel_ his anger with every inch on her skin, and it was unbearable.

“You have no idea…” Claire jerked her chin up, trying to find it in her to speak past the burning lump in her throat, her eyes starting to prickle. “It was the hardest decision I have ever had to make in my life. And I will have to live with it until I die.”

He stepped back as if she’d slapped him, somehow deflated all of a sudden, the emotions so raw on his face it was impossible to look directly at him. And so she dropped her eyes, scared of how close she was to falling apart, some deep, dark part of her downright _ecstatic_ about not having to carry this secret anymore.

“Then why….?” He asked softly, his voice tight and low, the struggle to understand flashing across his features.

She sucked in a shuddered breath, her eyes fixed on grey veiny patterns on the carpet at her feet. “I wasn’t ready. I was a mess. I wasn’t… I couldn’t keep _you_ around. What chance did I stand at being a decent parent?” Her shoulders moved in a half-shrug, and she locked her gaze with his again, her teeth biting into her bottom lip. “I don’t even know if I want it at all. A baby, I mean. Ever. But I certainly didn’t want it like that. Not when I was terrified out of my mind and alone and…”

“You’d never have had to do it alone,” he said – a promise that had no weight to it anymore – and scrubbed a tired hand over his face.

Claire’s lips curved into a sad smile, the unspoken _What does it matter now?_ hanging between them, and Owen looked away, finding her wistfulness harder to deal with than her anger. “I wish it ended differently between us.” She said after a while.

“Me, too,” he admitted in a whoosh of breath, the fight drained out of them both. “Look, Claire--”

“I would’ve told you,” she said. “If you were around, I swear to god I would have, whether we were together or not. And I wanted to… when you came back…” She paused and focused on picking a loose thread on the sleeve of her sweater, the fingers trembling and her voice quivering, each word tumbling out with effort. “But I didn’t know how.”

Owen nodded, not sure how to respond, his whole body throbbing like an old wound cut open again. An hour ago, he couldn’t imagine it was possible to be more confused and hurting than when Gray told him about the baby. But now, bitter accusations rolling on the tip of his tongue tasted foul and wrong in his mouth, and the nervous energy radiating off of Claire was making his skin prickle, the fine hairs on his arms standing on end.

Across the room, Claire looked small and breakable, and for a moment, he almost forgot that her words slashed across him like a knife. The surge of fierce protectiveness that jolted through him was so overbearing it nearly left him doubled over and gasping for air.

“I’m sorry,” he said although whether he was apologizing for their broken relationship, for not being here when she needed him most, or for getting her pregnant when neither of them needed or wanted it, he didn’t know.

Claire pulled off her glasses and rubbed the corners of her eyes.

“I’m sorry, too,” she whispered, and Owen nodded again like that toy with a loose neck people sometimes put on the dashboards. There were no words left to say, the void between them deep and vast and bottomless as they were teetering on the brink – one wrong move, and there would be no escaping it, no coming back. “And I’m sorry you had to find out that way.”

The comforting thought was that nothing he could throw at her could hurt her more than everything she was already thinking about herself. It was a small consolation, but Claire didn’t dare hope she could ask for much else.

“I think you should go,” she said when the moment started to stretch and the ticking on the clock on the wall grew so loud that she wanted to unzip her skin and climb out of it just to see if life made more sense that way.

“I should,” Owen agreed without fighting her for maybe only the second time since they’d met. And in that moment, she hated him for not storming out like he should have, for giving her what she wanted so easily.

She didn’t move until the front door closed behind him and his car came to life outside, the engine rumbling loudly in the night. Then she grabbed the phone from the coffee table and punched in Karen’s number, having to dial twice because her fingers kept hitting the wrong buttons.

Karen picked up on a second ring, and the sound of the TV in the background burst into the receiver before her voice did. “ _Hey, Claire, mind if I call you back in_ \--”

“You told him,” Claire interjected. “What right did you have to do it?”

The noise faded a little as her sister moved to another room. “ _I did what?_ ”

“You told Owen,” Claire snapped, the tension of the past thirty minutes rendering her rigid, her mind swimming.

“ _What are you talking about?... Zach, for heaven’s sake, turn it off!_ ” And then, “ _I didn’t, Claire, I swear. Why would I_ …” She trailed off. “ _Oh, crap. I’m going to kill them_.”

Claire’s fingers clenched around the receiver, holding tight onto it. “You told Zach and Gray.”

Karen drew in a long breath and let it out through her nose. “ _I_ _didn’t. They overheard me talking to you… I’m sorry, Claire. They knew it was not to be discussed. I don’t know why on earth… They’re so dead_.”

Claire squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Don’t. It’s not their fault. I should never have dragged any of you into this.”

“ _No, don’t say that_.”

“It’s okay, forget it. I have to go.”

“ _Claire, wait_.” She sounded scared and desperate now. “ _Tell me what_ \--”

“Later, okay?” Claire hung before her sister could say anything else.

The phone started to ring almost straight away, but she turned off the sound and trailed numbly into the hallway to lock the door, her legs cottony and barely responsive. Claire leaned heavily against it as a muffled sob rose from her chest, something inside of her snapping at last. She pressed her hand to her mouth and slid down to the floor, her whole body completely drained and her brain fuzzy.

And then she buried her face in her knees and let herself cry for the first time since she saw two blue lines on a plastic stick from the pharmacy down the road. She cried for herself, and for Owen, and for everything that could have been but never was.

\---

_Claire, call me. Or pick up the phone. K._

_Claire, I’m sorry. The boys are grounded but I promised not to murder them. Seriously, call me. K._

_Or text. Text me so I know you’re still here and not—somewhere else. K._

_I just want to know that you are okay. Are you? K._

_If you don’t call me right away, I swear to god I’ll storm your house! I’m worried! K._

_PS I know where the spare key is. K._

_Love you, sis. K_.

It was funny, really. Despite what everyone thought, her life on the island was an easy one. Claire had _Goals_ and _Things That Needed To Happen_ , and everything else was categorized and sorted in the order of priority. Day after day, she had been going through motions, effortless like a choreographed dance, following the To-Do lists and agendas and rearranging the tasks as if they were pieces of chess on a board. There was logic to it all.

The moment she tried to apply the same principle to her post-incident life, it spiraled down into chaos. The world refused to be compartmentalized.

Maybe there was a reason she’d spent eight years on the island in the middle of nowhere, after all. Maybe Karen was right. Maybe she _was_ too scared of living.

_Coffee tomorrow. My treat. C xo_

\---

He didn’t leave.

The next time Claire saw Owen was when she was on her way to her regular coffee place a couple of days later. Wearing sweats and a fleece hoody, he was cutting across the park, his bright green trainers pounding on the packed snow and black patches of asphalt, his cheeks flushed and his breath coming out of his mouth in small white puffs. Among the bare trees and low hedges lining the paths, his form looked strikingly bright in contrast.

He had zero reasons to come here, and even fewer to stay, and the fact that he did shouldn’t have felt comforting. But it did.

Once she was sure he was running in the opposite direction from her, Claire parked the car and climbed out and into the chilly wind that crawled immediately under her sweater, raising goosebumps on her skin. Her eyes narrowed against the blinding whiteness of the snow as she watched Owen grow smaller until he disappeared completely from her view. And then she slid back into the driver’s seat and drove away, her coffee forgotten.

In the weeks following their separation, both before and after she found out about the pregnancy, Claire often wondered what and when had gone wrong between them. She wasn’t obtuse or blind. She knew it wasn’t working out, and she knew that Owen knew it, too. The physical intimacy was their desperate attempt to reconnect and find each other again, stay tethered to one another against the currents and tides that kept pulling them further apart. She was terrified of losing Owen, but it was so easy to shut off the world and get lost _in_ him, to dissolve in the only realm that was making them feel whole.

But it wasn’t enough, and she didn’t know how to fix it. And at some point, Owen figured it out, too.

She asked him to give her time.

He left the country for nearly 7 months.

If this wasn’t a goddam perfect ending to their messy relationship, she didn’t know what was.

\---

There was a bottle of scotch in her fridge that someone gave to Claire, and on the day of the one-year anniversary of the incident, it seemed like as good a company as any. She pulled it out and poured nearly half of it into a round tumbler, grimacing at the strong smell that filled the kitchen, tickling her nostrils.

The reports about Jurassic World were crowding every channel as if no time had passed and she was fresh off the island and in the whirlpool of the aftermath of the incident all over again, her stomach coiling in that familiar way she once hoped would never come back. Sitting on the floor in the living room, Claire took a sip of her drink and allowed it to burn its way down her throat and settle heavily inside of her, the pleasant warmth spreading over her body and dulling the sharpness of the world.

The program she chose started out nice enough, she had to give them that. They showed the footage from John Hammond’s time, explaining his ideas and visions as grainy photographs of the first park and a shiny new lab with incubators lining the walls faded from one into another. It was only when the story reached Simon Masrani’s era that everything went wrong. A brief summary of _years_ of hard work was quickly replaced with the video clips salvaged from the security cameras not destroyed by the animals. The image of her with that damned red flare in her hand, dark and unfocused, came up about fifteen minutes into the broadcast, her name splayed over the screen and the T-Rex’s eyes glowing in the background.

Claire leaped up from her spot and only barely made it to the kitchen sink before she threw up, hot tears stinging her eyes and her throat closed up.

She poured the rest of scotch down the drain, switched off the TV and turned off her phone before anyone tried to reach her. And then she crawled into her bed and pulled a blanket over her head, praying that if she stayed there long enough, she would disappear.

\---

“You could still come,” Karen noted as she studied a label on a packet of rice.

“I told you, it’s a work thing. I have a conference call with Japan,” Claire explained, pushing the grocery cart down the aisle as she followed her sister who moved on to canned goods. “By the time it’s over, it’ll be too late anyway.”

“Does Japan not celebrate Christmas?” Karen’s eyes narrowed in disbelief.

“Not officially. Certainly not their stock brokers, I’m afraid.” Claire’s lips curved slightly. “But, as I said, I’ll help you cook, and I’ll be back first thing in the morning to open the presents.”

“No, thank you. And - you better.” Her sister dumped three cans of pumpkin puree into the cart.

Claire’s mouth opened. “I can cook!” She protested, all wounded dignity.

“Yes, but can anyone eat it?” Karen deadpanned.

Claire rounded the corner, heading for the condiments. “You know, for someone whose fridge is stuffed with frozen lasagnas, you sure can--” Her cart bumped into someone’s basket, metal grating on metal, and she stepped back quickly. “Oh, I’m sorry….” She started apologetically, and faltered. “Owen.”

He stepped back as well – automatically, she hoped – and shifted his basket from one hand to another. “Hey.”

Claire hadn’t heard from or of him ever since he walked out her door that night a few days ago, everyone walking on proverbial eggshells around her as far as this subject was concerned. But _of course_ , he had to be here – in this store, in this aisle – on the day when she finally decided to crawl out of her hiding hole, if only for the sake of pacifying Karen before the words ‘help’ and ‘talk to someone’ crept back into their conversations.

She should’ve known it was destined to backfire.

“Why are you--” Karen bumped into her from behind, propelling Claire half a step forward again, and then her jaw dropped. “Owen.” Her gaze darted between him and Claire warily, although she was the first one to compose herself. “Last minute shopping?”

“Something like that,” he admitted with a smirk that didn’t quite touch his eyes.

“Same here.” A pause. “Hey, you know what? I’m…” She cleared her throat and added some pep to her demeanor. “I’m making a Christmas dinner. You should come. The boys would be happy if you were there. As would we all.”

“I don’t think--” Owen began.

“Don’t say no on my account,” Claire muttered, suddenly very interested in a… pack of tomato soup? How did that happen? She hated tomato soup. Quickly, she put it back on the shelf and looked him square in the face. “I’m not going.”

One of his eyebrows arched curiously. He glanced at Karen out of the corner of his eye and shifted from foot to foot. “Well, in that case…”

“I just thought of something.” Claire turned Karen. “Cranberries. We forgot cranberries.”

“Claire….”

“I’ll be right back.”

“You’re like children, I swear,” she heard Karen say to Owen as she rushed past him, leaving the cart with her sister, and darted down the aisle, wet soles of her boots squeaking on the linoleum floor, only managing to inhale properly when she found herself among crates of milk. It felt surprisingly good to be at least a hundred feet away from Owen Grady and his quick dinners and the eyes that tried to see something inside of her that Claire wasn’t sure was there.

She pressed a hand to her heaving chest.

Wasn’t it ironic? There was nowhere no run now, she was literally trapped in the dairy section next to piles of cheese, but it didn’t still stop her from trying to escape. A frighteningly familiar pattern. Surprise, surprise… Claire tried to recall where it all started but came up empty. It must’ve happened so long ago she’d need not a shovel but a goddamn excavator to dig this deep.

She caught up with Karen at the checkout register and set two cans of cranberries on the conveyer belt. Karen, who was unloading the rest of their stuff, frowned. “Is everything fine?” And then, “I shouldn’t have invited him.” Her voice lowered. “I’m sorry, Claire, I’ll cancel. I’m sure he’ll--”

“Don’t,” Claire stopped her. “It’s okay, really.”

“Are _you_ okay?”

And this was it – all the pity and sympathy Claire was trying to stay away from hit her like an avalanche.

She shrugged helplessly, staring straight ahead on the off-chance that Owen was still here. “He can’t even look at me.” Her gaze wandered past Karen, following the people exiting the store with carts and bags. “Not that I can blame him. Half the time, I can’t look at myself either.”

**To be continued...**


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ll do my best to revive this story because I actually like it, and that doesn’t happen often. Besides, it’s just been sitting on my laptop for about 6 months now, so.... Have fun!

_It was a mistake._

_It had to be a mistake_

_She did it wrong._

_Was there a wrong way to take a pregnancy test?_

_And how could she possibly feel so empty and so scattered all at once?_

_Claire’s hands curled into fists and she sucked in a ragged breath that caught in her closed-up throat. And just like that, the Indominus Rex became the second scariest thing that happened to her._

_A week ago, there was a moment when she actually felt free for the first time in months. It was like her whole life filled with endless possibilities was stretching before her, the enormity of it equally frightening and exciting. Like everything was fixed at last, the broken parts inside her finally fitting together in the pattern that made sense._

_And then a few days ago, Claire found herself sitting in the corner of her bedroom with her arms clasped around her knees because a car backfired outside, her mind going into a full panic mode, vividly reminding her about the gunfire._

_And today… today it was like someone turned her entire world inside out in a way she couldn’t quite comprehend yet._

_“Which one is it?” Karen asked quietly in that cautious voice that implied that she was scared her sister might break or explode, or first break and then explode._

_“The third one,” Claire muttered, sounding distance and far-away as though she needed to pull the uncooperative words from somewhere deep inside her. “They can all be wrong,” she added weakly even though she knew they weren’t. “The false positive thing.”_

_Karen just gave her an uncertain look and a noncommittal shrug. “You don’t have to decide anything now.”_

_“There’s nothing to decide,” Claire dropped her face in her hands and buried her fingers in her hair, her eyes squeezed shut and her breathing short._

_The truth was she made the decision the moment she suspected what was going on. Before the first test, or the second. Before she called her sister because there was no one else left and she was terrified out of her mind. Yet, even so, there was a black gaping hole in her chest, growing bigger with each passing moment, and she feared it was only a matter of time before it was large enough to swallow her whole._

_“Oh, Claire…”_

_She turned to Karen, frightened and miserable, her gaze haunted. “I can’t. I can't do this.”_

_Karen put a hand on the knot of her tightly clasped hands and curled her arm around Claire’s shoulders, pulling her closer. And it was only then that Claire realized how badly she was shaking, her teeth chattering despite the fact that the room was boiling hot._

_“It’s going to be okay,” Karen promised_

_No, it’s not, Claire thought, staring anywhere but at the white plastic stick on the coffee table, two blue stripes taunting her. She leaned into Karen, struggling to stop thinking and feeling, just for now, as her fingers clutched her stomach in a fierce, instinctive protectiveness she knew couldn’t last._

\---

It was interesting, really, how something could be both a trigger and a remedy at the same time.

The faster Owen ran, the clearer and louder he could hear heavy footfalls of a prehistoric beast, following him close, seconds away from sinking its teeth into him, its breath hot on Owen’s neck, the memory imprinted so deeply on him he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to shake it off.

And yet, weirdly, running also felt like moving forward somehow, in a greater sense than just getting from Point A to Point B. With every mile, his mind seemed sharper, less foggy, the whole world more in focus. At the end, he always felt like a blind man who was finally granted the gift of vision. Five, seven, ten, twelve. As many as he could handle before his muscles started to burn and his lungs were screaming for air; until his mind was empty, the desire to step out of his skin back in its cage; until it was time to repeat all this again. It felt like he was transcending the boundaries of time, speeding up the healing.

He needed to not think, for as long as he possibly could, and the physical exertion was one of a very few things that helped with that.

In the days following his conversation – his _screaming match_ – with Claire, he packed up his schedule with everything he could think of, running at least 10 miles every morning and picking up extra shifts at work even though they didn’t need him there and couldn’t pay for overtime. He didn’t care. He needed to be away from home, away from the walls that seemed to be closing in on him, away from the suffocating silence of the empty rooms.

He was starting to recognize the patterns he’d faced before, but right now, Owen didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to care. The only thing he could do was keep moving until there was nothing left that he needed to get away from.

He hopped up the porch steps on a Sunday morning, taking two at a time and kicking himself mentally for not stopping for coffee on his way back from the park, feeling pleasantly tired in the way that felt just right. And then he skidded to an abrupt halt when he saw Gray sitting in an old wicker chair he left outside, not sure yet if he wanted to keep it or throw it away.

“Gray?”

The boy looked up at him from under the hair hanging over his eyes, squished by his knitted hat, his eyes serious and more grown-up than Owen remembered, almost frighteningly so. The realization sent an uncomfortable jolt through him as his eyebrows pulled together.

Still breathing hard from his run, he ushered Gray inside before the boy froze his nose off, questions crowding his mind. “What’s with the modesty? You know where the key is.”

Gray pulled off his hat and dropped his backpack on the floor in the hallway, still eyeing Owen pensively, like he couldn’t quite decide all of sudden what to make of him.

“Yeah,” he responded vaguely.

“Everything okay?” Owen pulled the earbuds out of his ears and stuffed his iPod into the pocket of his hoodie, the cold air still coating his skin, hanging around him like a cloud. “Haven’t see you in a while.”

“House arrest,” Gray explained without much enthusiasm, his voice tight in the way Owen didn’t recognize.

“Yeah, your mom told me,” he chuckled, and then his eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Does she know you’re here?”

Gray winced. “Not really,” he admitted, if a little reluctantly, his expression painfully guilty. “I just…” he trailed off and looked around, rolling his shoulders as he moved toward the kitchen.

“Okay,” Owen drawled slowly, puzzled, and scratched his chin. “It’s okay.”

With a pat on the shoulder, he left Gray at the kitchen table with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and retreated to the living room to call Karen who was frantic by this point, assuring her that everything was okay and that there was no need to come - he was going to drop Gray off in a little while. The hysterical edge had left her voice by the time the conversation was over.

“ _I’m sorry, Owen. I have no idea… he’s never done anything like that before_.”

“It’s cool, really,” he promised her. “I told them they’re welcome anytime.” He knew that _this_ was not the case, but it felt like the right thing to clarify nonetheless. “Don’t worry. We’ll have a chat and I’ll bring him back soon.”

“Am I in trouble?” Gray asked when Owen returned to the kitchen and set the cordless down on the counter.

“I hope not,” Owen shook his head. “So, what’s up?” He asked, snatching a bottle of Gatorade from the fridge. Gray shrugged. “You want, um… hot chocolate?”

Gray’s ears perked up. “With marshmallows?”

Owen puckered his lips thoughtfully and peeked into the cupboard. “Actually… yeah,” he responded.

A force of habit.

The last time Owen had to do his own shopping, he was still living with Claire. Now, tiny marshmallows, her favourite brand of coffee and cinnamon pop tarts seemed to be appearing out of thin air in his pantry, jumping on the will of their own into his shopping basket and sneaking past the cashiers before Owen knew he was buying them. His sheets smelled of her detergent, and he consciously picked up Claire’s preferred shower gel the last time he was stocking up his bathroom because why the hell not? He was pretty far down the self-destruction path anyway. Why not torment himself with the scent that used to cling to her whenever she’d step out of the shower?

It also occurred to him that making hot chocolate on the stove instead of simply microwaving a cup of milk and hoping the powder would dissolve without lumps was Claire’s way, and he scowled at himself for that, his lips pressed together stubbornly. She’d gotten so deep under his skin he was feeling her in his bones, ever-present and familiar, half-wishing to scratch her out, half-hoping she’d never leave.

He could be angry with her, even hate her, but there was no way he could ever cut her out without leaving the scars so deep they’d never heal.

“Are you mad?” Gray asked when Owen put a mug in front of him and focused on stirring the drink with a spoon, a slight crease lodged between his furrowed eyebrows.

Owen blinked, confused. “Mad? That you stopped by?”

Gray shrugged again. “Zach said you wouldn’t want to hang out with us anymore. Because you’re mad at Aunt Claire.” He looked up, grim and resigned. “I mean… she was kind of upset.” His voice dropped and he pursed his lips together in a stubborn line.

It took Owen a minute to figure out what he was talking about, and then it hit him all of a sudden – the waiting on the porch, the radio silence, his uncertain half-answers.

Gray’s expression right now bore a striking resemblance to the one of Claire’s on that chilly February morning when Owen showed up at her door at 8.30 – be damned the early flight, his only option on such a short notice – with a bag of necessities and about a hundred layers of exhaustion wrapped around him. After a while, it stopped seeming likely that she would be coming back to California anytime soon, and he missed her. She looked at him with the same mistrust then – like she expected his desire to stay with her be a joke of some kind. It was as if thinking that they were so easily forgettable they couldn’t fathom the idea of someone wanting to stick around was a family thing or something.

It occurred to him then that he tended to forget sometimes that both Zach and Gray were as much the victims of the park as the strangers he’d never really met, and the fact that they got off the island alive didn’t change the way it scarred them in more ways than anyone could see. And how tragic and unfair was it that they had to grow up overnight like this?

Owen leaned toward the boy across the table.

“Gray…” He heaved a long sigh. “Of course, I’m not mad. Claire and I… we’re fine,” he assured him. Which was a major understatement, unless _fine_ actually meant _anything but,_ but it hardy seemed like the right time to go into the technicalities. “And even if we weren’t, it’s got nothing to do with you. Or Zach. Or anyone else.”

A few days ago, he actually did call her to see how she was dealing with the media being suddenly flooded once again with the gruesome post-incident photos, the damned video clip of her and the T-Rex, and those endless interviews with survivors and families of the deceased. Her phone was turned off though and he didn’t have the guts to leave a voicemail, choosing to finish half a bottle of tequila and watch something mind-numbing on Netflix until that deep, slashing pain inside him receded to a dull throb instead.

If this situation could get any more dysfunctional, Owen didn’t quite see how.

Gray’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Really?”

“Really.” Owen tapped his fingers on the tabletop, struggling to form the next question without sounding like a total moron, although the fact that he did feel that way wasn’t helping the matters. He wanted to know how she was doing, and there was a good chance her nephew wouldn’t lie.

But Gray beat him to it. “So, you’re still coming for Christmas? Mom said you would but…” he trailed off, busy fishing marshmallows out of his drink. _But it’s not like people are good at keeping their promises_. Just because he didn’t say it didn’t mean Owen missed it.

“Sure I am,” he assured the boy. “Who else is coming?” That did sound casual, right?

“Um, a couple of mom’s friends,” Gray responded. “And Zach’s girlfriend, I think.” He grinned. “Unless she comes to her senses by then.”

Owen laughed. “Looks like you could use a company.”

The boy nodded with enthusiasm, finally at ease. “It can get overbearing,” he warned Owen. “Mom usually makes, like, five kinds of mashed potatoes.”

“That does sound intense,” Owen admitted, pushing back to turn on the coffeemaker.

Afterwards, he sent Gray to watch something on TV and hopped in the shower, scrubbing his face in hopes of finally feeling awake, hot water melting his muscles that felt tight and tense after a 12-mile run. And later, he made proper breakfast for them both and allowed Gray to complete whatever level of _World of Warcraft_ he was at before taking him home, pleading with Karen not to punish him and then purposely driving by Claire’s place on the way back to his house. Solely because it was more convenient, traffic-wise.

Her driveway was empty.

\---

“They offered me a promotion,” Claire announced, sticking a baby carrot in her mouth and chewing thoughtfully while Karen tried to wrestle a half-cooked stuffed turkey back into the oven.

She checked her phone to see how much time she had before she needed to head back and go through her notes, absently noting that the prospect of spending the next few hours on Skype felt almost like a relief. Which probably qualified as a major step back in her readjustment regimen.

“Really?” Her sister finally pushed the metal tray inside and slammed the door shut with a loud bang, blowing her hair off her face. She grabbed a towel from the hook to wipe her hands with. “That’s great, Claire!”

“I guess.” Claire observed the chaos around them and walked over to the window to push it open. With all the baking, grilling, and boiling the room felt like a sauna. “You can trust me with _something_ , you know,” she added sternly.

“Dicing,” Karen agreed without protest, sticking her nose into a pot on the stove. “You can dice something.”

“Sure. Dice.”

“Onions. Vegetable drawer.”

Claire hesitated. “Maybe not the onions.” Which earned her a dirty look. “Onions it is.”

“So, this promotion…” Karen began, eyeing her sister curiously. “I mean, it’s been a rough few months--”

“All ten of them,” Claire mumbled, searching for a clean knife.

“It’s a good thing, right?”

“Of course.” She shrugged, finally finding a clear spot for a chopping board between a bowl of potato salad and a bag of apples that were meant to be turned into a pie. “More challenging. Less… tedious. A step up from _The Dick Van Dyke Show_.”

“I’d say so,” Karen snorted.

Claire took a breath and added, “It’s in Boston.”

There was a long pause, interrupted only by the sound of her knife rhythmically hitting the board, a sappy jingle playing on the radio, and the screams of Zach and Gray from the backyard where they were either having a snowball fight, or trying to murder one another – it was hard to tell the difference. That, and Karen thinking so loudly it was almost drowning everything else.

Claire could feel her sister stare at her, unable to look up until she ran out of onions and her next best option was to chop her hand off. That would sure stir the conversation in a less rocky direction.

“Boston?” Karen echoed after a minute or two, and it came out as a poorly masked accusation.

At last, Claire sighed and put the knife down. “I never planned to stay here for good,” she said, looking up, her tone defensive and apologetic at the same time. “It was always meant to be temporary. To catch my breath after… everything.”

“Is this because of Owen?” Her sister was not the one to beat around the bush.

Claire chuckled humorlessly. “Contrary to popular belief, my life does not revolved around Owen Grady.”

“Well, no. Only the past year of it,” Karen hummed, making Claire cringe. “What did you say?”

“I haven’t said anything yet. I don’t have to until after the New Year.”

“But you think of going.” It wasn’t a question, and the hurt in Karen’s statement was loud and clear.

She was.

Not until the offer came in, but now Claire was finding it hard to simply dismiss it. Truth be told, her current job, compared to her position in Masrani Global, was what a LEGO tower was to an Empire State Building. It wasn’t boring, per se. IT kept her busy alright, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to grow, and she knew for a fact that if she didn’t find a way to change it, she’d end up in the exact same office forty years from how, wondering how it happened.

Claire was getting restless, the life that not so long ago was barely anything but getting through one day after another had started to take shape again. It was frightening and thrilling, and even if she wasn’t sure that moving to another city was what she needed, she knew she didn’t NOT want to give it a try.

Besides, it wasn’t radical, was it? Boston was a couple of states away, not several time zones away.

“I don’t know,” Claire admitted, rubbing her forehead. “It’s not a bad thing, Karen. I know it’s not like living the same neighborhood, but it’s still closer… than…”

“South America. I know.”

Karen leaned against the counter and folded her arms over her chest. Her cheeks were flushed from the steam and her hair was falling over her face, fizzy in the heat, and she reminded Claire of their mother all of sudden, in numerous situations just like this one that took place in the house Claire was now calling hers. And just like that, she was overcome with the need to have her sister fix her life the way her mother knew how to make her skinned knees hurt less. Except this time, she knew it wasn’t happening.

The back door burst open and Zach and Gray tumbled in noisily, talking over each other and pushing one another, a mess of parkas and snow clinging to the soles of their boots. They ran into the kitchen, all red cheeks and messy hair, and the biggest smiles Claire had ever seen.

“Aunt Claire!” Gray yelped, throwing himself at her and squeezing her tight. And she couldn’t help but break into a broad smile and hug him back, feeling his rapid heartbeat against her chest. He smelled of soap and snow when she kissed the top of his head, and his genuine glee at the sight of her was so pure it splintered her into pieces, sending a pang of wistfulness through her, reminding her of everything she was going to miss if she left again.

She was starting to grow roots here, and it wouldn’t be long before they got so long and thick she wouldn’t be able to pull them out without breaking something that was a part of her in the process. The idea left her antsy and unsettled, even more confused than before.

“Out!” Karen commanded once they grabbed their snacks, slapping their hands away from the bowls and plates they weren’t supposed to touch, and they obediently left, taking their noise with them.

Claire bit her lip as she watched them go. “I need a fresh start,” she said at last. “A change of scenery. Before I lost my mind completely.”

Karen sighed. “How many fresh starts can there be? You will run out of world before you will run out of things you want to get away from.”

\---

Coping was a funny thing.

While Claire relied heavily on a cocktail of isolation and denial, Gray crammed every extracurricular activity the school was offering into his schedule to keep his mind focused on something that wasn’t the massacre at the park; Zach suddenly developed an interest in team sports and detention (the things he previously managed to avoid, equally dividing his time between the two now); and Karen got a cat.

Well, technically it was Gray’s idea and, technically, it was a compromise. Both boys wanted a dog while Karen wanted to not have anything to do with it when the novelty of having a pet wore off and her sons got bored of feeding it and such.

Hence, a giant orange monster who Gray, for the reasons unknown to Claire, started calling Mr. Smithy - even though his adoption papers stated that he was supposed to go by Shrek - because _What kind of a name is it for a cat? He’s not even green!_ To be fair, he didn’t look much like Mr. Smithy to Claire either – more like that Muppet with drumsticks, but she didn’t say anything to Gray lest she give him any ideas. Now Mr. Smithy was taking up half of the house, loudly demanding food and affection whenever he was awake.

And so when Karen took Zach and Gray to visit Scott’s family over New Year’s, Claire was summoned to be ‘an aunt in charge’ – something that Zach found hilarious. He was still laughing on his way to the car, purposely ignoring Claire’s stink eye.

Yes, she could have taken the new member of their family to her place, but the prospect of hauling forty pounds of cat food and thirty pounds of cat to her house didn’t look appealing to her. Besides, the Mitchells had HBO. It felt nice, Claire had to admit, not to be alone and yet not feel forced to carry on a conversation or be obliged to stick to social conventions without being asked repeatedly if she was okay every time her plastic smile slipped off her face.

“What do you want to watch?” She asked Mr. Smithy, flipping through channels. He chose to fall asleep.

When the doorbell rang, Claire turned off the TV and scooped up the cat that was sprawled across her lap, purring like a jet engine. “Well, here’s my dinner and your…” she paused and regarded her charge thoughtfully. “Do you like shrimp? Of course, you do. What am I saying?”

She opened the door just as Owen raised his hand to press the doorbell button again, and for a moment, they just stood there, looking at each other – him with his hand lifted, and her with a giant orange cat.

“You’re not Gray,” he said at last, being the first one to shake off the surprise.

“You’re not my food,” Claire echoed now that they were stating the obvious.

His lips quirked for a brief moment. In the blue-purple twilight that could only ever happen on clear winter days, he looked wild, all broad shoulders and wind-tousled hair. His face, half-hidden in the shadows, seemed to be made of straight lines and sharp angles as if it was cut out of a piece of granite. A striking contrast to the softness she used to associate with him.

He squinted in the wind as she shifted the cat in her arms, and then showed her a plastic case he was holding. A video game, if Claire was not mistaken. “Gray was asking to borrow it,” Owen explained. “Thought I’d bring it over.”

“Oh.” She glanced back into the house. “They’re gone. Visiting Scott’s parents.”

“Right.” He nodded, if a little uncertainly. “I thought they were coming back this morning.”

She shook her head. “On Sunday.” A pause. “You can leave it if you want,” Claire suggested as the chill started to creep through her cardigan, her toes feeling like cold stones even in thick wool socks.

“Sure,” he agreed easily.

Someone cleared the throat behind them, and they both turned to find a guy in a green-black delivery uniform standing on the porch with a brown paper bag in his hands, the name of the Chinese restaurant embroidered on his jacket and the front of his cap.

His eyes darted between Claire and Owen before fixing on Claire. “Is this 1573 Oak Drive?” He asked even though the street number painted on the mailbox was hard to miss.

“Yes,” Claire said quickly. She looked down, then over her shoulder, realizing that her wallet was still somewhere in the living room, then at Owen, then at the delivery man again. “Um… just a second.” She turned to Owen again. “Could you…” She was meant to ask him to hold Mr. Smithy, but he waved her off.

“I got this.”

The bills were pulled out of his wallet and exchanged for the paper bag, and then they both finally squeezed into the warmth of the house – Claire still with the cat whose ears and nose were twitching curiously in the presence of a stranger, and Owen with her food and the new _Uncharted_ , according to the label on the case.

“Thanks,” she offered him a small grateful smile, which left Owen elated. “Let me get the money.”

He set the food and the disk down on the chest of drawers near the door cluttered with gloves and forgotten earphones and spare keys and bus tickets. “Don’t be absurd, Claire. I can afford to buy you…” he peeked into the bag, “whatever this is.” It smelled delicious, he could admit that much. “Just… tell Gray I stopped by.”

She was about to protest, but nodding seemed like an easier path to take, what with being too dumbfounded to see him after a few weeks of doing her best to avoid him. And then it struck her how ironic this was – in her attempt to get away from her own house that was packed to the brim with memories of her 3-month long life with Owen, they found each other in one another’s company once again.

If he was bothered by it, he didn’t show it though, not in any way she could see.

“When did this happen?” Owen stepped toward her, reaching to scratch the cat between his ears and earning a purr of appreciation.  

From this close, she could smell the aftershave on his skin, the faint scent of the Ocean Breeze air freshener from his car and the cold winter air on his clothes, and something intoxicating that was just Owen, her chest tightening momentarily – a knee-jerk reflex to his presence. He had no right to have that effect on her still. Not when he himself could hardly bear being in the same room with her half the time.

“A few days ago,” she explained quickly.

“So you’re--?”

“Babysitting.”

“I think the term is cat-sitting,” he pointed out with a smile.

“Well, whatever it’s called.” Claire cleared her throat. “I guess I need to prove that I can keep a cat alive before Karen ever trusts me with her kids again,” she joked drily. “His name is Mr. Smithy.”

Mr. Smithy turned to her as Owen’s eyes popped out in surprise. “Really?”

She hummed. “Not my idea.”

He snorted. “Well, he fits right in.” On impulse, he touched a curled wisp of bright red hair at her temple. She went completely still, staring at him with wide eyes, barely breathing, and he jerked his hand away as if the touch left him with a burn mark, his fingers curling into a fist. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his parka. “I should… go.”

A flicker of something flashed across her face, gone without a trace before he knew to look for it, although whether it was disappointment or relief Owen couldn’t tell.

“Of course.”

“Yeah, I need to get back to work.” A lie. “Double shift.” Double lie. Claire knew for a fact he had a week off because Gray wouldn’t shut up about going sleighing when they got back from their father’s.

She nodded all the same. Who was she to deny him the pleasure of getting the hell away from her? After all, he quite finessed the art of doing just so lately.

“Sure.” A fake, polite smile appeared on her face. “I’ll… I’ll tell Gray you came by.”

Afterwards, Claire decided she wasn’t hungry after all. She fed Mr. Smithy, allowing him to finish all of her seafood, and then found a marathon of _Seinfeld_ on TV and fell asleep on the couch a few hours later to the sound of Jerry and George bickering about something utterly insignificant, still wrapped in Owen’s scent, lingering on her skin.

\---

One of the first things Claire had to learn after the incident was that there was a very fine line between coping and denial. The one that defined everything and that was very easy to cross. At times, she couldn’t help but ask herself if moving back to the Midwest was the former or the latter. It didn’t make Jurassic World disappear altogether, but it made it less real, soft around the edges and faded even on the worst of days.

And now she was doing it again – hiding in her sister’s house and taking alternate routes to the supermarket for the sake of avoiding Owen at all costs. Which was ridiculous, really. Claire Dearing, a grown woman, accomplished and confident, was now going out of her way to change her daily routine because of a _boy_. 

Freud was probably rolling in his grave. Laughing.

This was supposed to be a point in her life when her scars would start to heal and she would finally stop waking up with a scream frozen on her lips, still running even though there was nothing left to run from. Instead, she was slowly turning into a psychiatrist’s dream who was sleeping on someone else’s couch and pretending that all was right in the world so long as everything that wasn’t stayed somewhere in the periphery of her attention.

She downright refused to admit how much Owen was affecting her. Again. His presence. The fact that he could barely look her in the eye. The effortless way he was involved with her family – way more than she’d ever been, too. And at the end of the day, she couldn’t help but feel like a mouse running through a maze, except there was no cheese to reward her for her efforts, and no way out, just the walls towering around her and one dad end after another.

Claire hadn’t seen Henry Wu once after the island, and for the first few months he stayed low, protected by the army of lawyers and the 100-page confidential agreements. He resurfaced around the time Masrani Global had finally given up on trying to convince Claire to come back, giving one interview after another – about _better_ and _safer_ and _improved_ park the company was aiming for this time, the one that would honour the memory of everyone for whom the vacation in Jurassic World became the last one.

The first time Claire heard this nonsense, she wondered if Wu had any idea how delusional he sounded. She knew it was about covering their losses more than anything else, but it didn’t make the whole situation any less absurd. If anything, he was making it worse, sounding downright delusional.

But looking at her life now, she couldn’t help but think that she was just as delusional as he was, clinging desperately to something she wanted to believe was true without seeing it for what it really was.

\---

Claire woke up with a start to the sound of her phone ringing persistently somewhere between the couch cushions. She fumbled for it, overcome with panic, her body flush with adrenaline. The mental images of Karen and the boys in a totaled car flashed through her mind and she forced herself to push them back before her heart burst in her chest from beating so fast she couldn’t hear herself think. No one called in the middle of the night for a chat, and she knew, she just knew--

“ _I still have your number on speed dial_ ,” a muffed voice broke through the blood rush in her ears.

“Owen?”

“ _And even if I didn’t, I still have it memorized. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to un--memorize it_.”

“I don’t under--”

“ _I’m so tired of lying, Claire_.” It came out in a whoosh of breath, only barely audible for her to catch it. “ _I lied to your nephew when I said that you and I were okay. And I keep lying to myself about not missing you so bad it drives me insane. ‘Cause I do_.”

It took her a solid minute to actually _hear_ him, and then she was suddenly wide-awake, his words running through her mind on an endless loop, over and over and over again.

“Are you drunk?” She asked quietly, rubbing her eyes, her mind hazy, still gripped in the dream she could no longer remember.

“ _No_ ,” he said, and the fact that he managed to slur a one-syllable word made Claire sigh. “ _Remember the Ferris Wheel?_ ”

Her fingers flexed around her phone.

There was a day in January last year, a couple of weeks after they returned to the States, when they drove to Santa Monica one afternoon, mostly to get out of their heads and not think about the Jurassic World scandal for a few hours. But also because Owen had never been there and it seemed like as good time as any. No TVs and no phone, just a stretch of highway and the ocean alongside it.

The day was grey, surprisingly cold for California, even in the winter. Thick clouds were hanging low over their heads, and the sea was the colour of steel. Claire was wrapped in his jacket because neither of them expected the wind to be this fierce near the water and her sweater was a poor shield against it, and her hand was safe and warm in his as they walked past the mostly closed booths to the end of the pier, the old boards moving and creaking under their feet with each step.

“Yes,” she said, not quite hearing her own voice.

Never a fan of heights, Claire didn’t want to get on the Ferris Wheel, but there was no line, and so she allowed him to steer her toward it, his arm wrapped around her shoulders to keep her warm. Or maybe to keep her from being blown away – she never quite figured out for sure.

“ _Remember how at the very top, you could see the sea blend into the sky?_ ” He continued.

She nodded even though he couldn’t see it and squeezed her eyes shut as a gaping hole opened inside her again. She could still taste the ocean on her lips, feel a sheer layer of salt from the surf coating their skins and clothes. The memory, sharp and clear, sent a surge of longing through her, strong and frighteningly overwhelming.

High up in the air above the half empty amusement park, the wind was even more vicious, throwing her hair in her face and making her eyes water. But the view was spectacular. The ocean seemed so vast and endless Claire couldn’t imagine the rest of the world being anything but this stormy canvas, streaked with white foam and tide ripples, different shades of green and grey crashing against one another. There was a gentle curve to the horizon, barely distinguishable as the water was the same colour as the sky, flocks of restless seagulls circling low over it, their cries mutes by the thundering clash of waves against the sand. An endless song of _shhhhhhh, shhhhhhh_.

She had never even imagined anything quite as magnificent. She had never felt so free.

And when she turned to Owen to make sure he was seeing what she was seeing and feeling what she was feeling, his palm curled over her cheek, and he was kissing her, softly and slowly, his lips warm against hers, almost scalding in the frigid air, his fingers pushing through her hair. He only pulled back when they were back down at the gate, both of them breathless, their lips swollen. Somewhere up above the ground, something inside Claire finally let go, and when Owen helped her out of their yellow pod, she clutched his hand tight, fearing she might soar into the sky.

“ _Where did it go?_ ” Owen asked softly. “ _That feeling that everything was going to be okay. One day, all is right. It’s rocky, but still... right. And the next, I wake up without you and nothing makes sense. But I still remember your phone number and…_ ” He swallowed, his voice hollow somehow. “ _And I can’t get you out of my head, even after—_ ”

He stayed quiet for a long moment, and Claire promptly forgot how to breathe. 

“Why are you calling me?” She whispered.

 _“I went to your sister’s dinner the other day because I promised Gray I would, and I hoped against all hope you’d be there. I kept looking for you among half a dozen people like—like you could just… I’m such an idiot… thought you’d be there because_ …” He inhaled sharply. “ _Why do the stars look so bright in winter? Is it because the space’s also cold?_ ”

The rest of his sentence was swallowed by a loud honking. 

“Owen, where are you?” She asked, instantly alarmed.

“ _Joe’s_ ,” he responded absently, and it took Claire a moment to remember that it was a bar on the other side of town. Not exactly her scene but not the seediest place one could end up in on a Friday night. “ _All cars are dark at night,”_ he muttered _. “Why bother painting them in colours when-_ -”

She sat up and kicked away the comforter draped over her legs. “You have got to be kidding me. You can’t drive!”

“ _Not gonna_ ,” he promised her, not sounding particularly convincing. “ _Just need to_ \--”

“Okay, look…” Claire tucked her hair behind her ear and turned on the reading lamp near the couch, blinking fast in the sudden onslaught of light, her mind racing. Mr. Smithy glared at her from the armchair when she rushed past him into the hallway. “Stay where you are. I’ll be there in—10, maybe 15 minutes.” Where they hell were her car keys? “Owen?”

There was a long pause before he spoke again. “ _Yeah. Not going. Staying_.”

Her car keys were nowhere to be found, so she grabbed the set to Karen’s Kia instead. What difference did it make anyway?

At four in the morning, even with the pale half-moon hanging high up in the sky, the world looked pitch black. She took a wrong turn and ended up on a dead end street, cursing under her breath, and then had to backtrack when she came across a construction site that closed one of the side roads. The asphalt was dark and slippery under the wheels of the car, crusted with a thin layer of ice, and Claire tried to remember now if Karen changed the tires to the winter ones, wondering absently if her rescue mission was going to end up with her wrapping the hood of her sister’s sedan around a telephone pole.

It took her almost half an hour to find the right neighborhood, the tension finally leaving her shoulders when she spotted bright lights of the shop windows and cafes stretched along the street, bright even in the dead of night.

A police car and an ambulance zipped past her at the intersection, making Claire grip the steering wheel tight to keep the car from barreling into a snowdrift on the curb of the road. Sirens blaring, they took _her_ turn, and Claire’s heart dropped into her stomach.

“Oh, God, no,” she breathed out, speeding up after them. _No, no, no_ …

**To be continued...**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, guys! Please leave a comment - comments are love and the authors live for them :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your wonderful support, guys! This story is my everything, and I’m very happy some of you are enjoying it :D

_On the morning after the incident, Owen woke up groggy and disoriented, his whole body aching in places he didn’t know existed, cuts and bruises on his back from the Pteranodon attack protesting his every move. A few hours of fitful sleep he managed to sink into after tossing and turning for a while left him even more tired somehow, his mind foggy. The pillowcase was scratchy against his cheek, humid air wrapped around him like a thick cloud that smelled faintly of dust._

_The small room – the only one they could find – was awash with the sunlight, and he squinted against it as he rolled onto the other side, blinking away the sand that someone seemingly rubbed into his eyes. His gaze slipped past the empty spot next to him as he scanned the room, a brief flash of panic jolting through him._

_Claire was curled up in the armchair by the tiny balcony, staring sightlessly outside. There wasn’t much to see – just a wall of the building across the street and a few palm trees, but she didn’t seem to care. Wrapped in a hotel bathrobe – one of the five items of clothing they owned between them at this point – and with her hair framing her face in thick, heavy waves, she looked tired and small and unfamiliar. Breakable in the ways he couldn’t comprehend._

_The fact that they ended up in bed together last night in a desperate attempt to block out the events of the previous 24 hours in the only way they could think of didn’t surprise Owen. He craved connection and being needed, feeling alive again. He was not, however, clear on where it left them or what the protocol was for the situations like this one. It wasn’t just about unwinding for him, but with Claire, he wasn’t sure._

_“You slept at all?” Owen asked quietly as he approached her, his voice thick and groggy, odd even to his own ears. Claire shook her head without turning to him, her forehead creased slightly, and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what must have been going on in her head._

_What he thought of as a much needed break only yesterday was starting to feel like an undeserved luxury today. They both needed a decent rest and probably food, and maybe not being in the spotlight for a day or two so they could get their bearings again. In reality, he knew it was too much to ask for, and a part of him hated the anxious energy radiating off of Claire, dark circles under her red-rimmed eyes, and the way her glance would dart toward her phone now and then, her expression a mixture of dread and resignation._

_There was a shit storm of an enormous magnitude waiting for them on the other side of the door, and if there was anyone in this world who knew how bad it was going to get in the next few weeks, it was her. And between that, and the fact that she didn’t seem to be able to look at him, her gaze skittering restlessly around, he was tempted to barricade them in the goddamn room and not leave this place for at least a month._

_With a sigh, Owen crouched down in front of her, his eyes following hers for a moment. From here, he could glimpse a tiny spot between the houses that was the ocean, so bright and impossibly blue in the sun it almost hurt to look at it. There were words rolling on his tongue, promises and reassurances, and everything else he couldn’t bring himself to say._

_“Claire…” He brushed her hair from her cheek, trailing his fingertip down her face, and when she finally turned to him, her eyes were shiny and her cheeks flushed like she was about to cry. “It’s okay, you know?”_

_“What’s okay?” She murmured._

_There was no way to tell if he was doing it right, or what ‘right’ even was – as far as he was concerned, they threw it out the window when they had sex last night, thus taking their already complicated relationship to a whole new level. But he tugged lightly at her hand, and when he did, she unfolded herself and allowed him to pull her toward him, his arms wrapping tightly around her as if to promise that he would never stop catching her. “You don’t have to be strong anymore.”_

_She stayed quiet for a long moment, her nose pressed to his cheek and her breath warm on his skin, and then she said, “I don’t know how to be anything else.”_

\---

Claire hated hospitals.

She couldn’t stand the smell of antiseptics and disinfectants, the bright lights and white walls, the impending sense of doom hanging in the air, the constant beeping of the machines, and the intercom announcements that sounded like gurgled nonsense to her ears, making her wonder how anyone ever understood them.

Or how people weren’t dropping dead because no one ever did.  

She couldn’t look at the people in thin hospital robes without feeling guilty, like she was flaunting her health and well-being in front of them, her eyes shifting involuntarily away from them when she passed them in the corridors. It was like the reality was warped in places that congregated large numbers of sick and injured, drained of hope. It scared and unnerved her, and more often than not, she avoided setting her foot in the medical institutions at all costs.

Unless she had no other choice.

She dropped the old copy of _Better Homes & Gardens_ onto the table and rubbed her eyes.

Behind the window that was taking up the whole wall, the uncertain winter sun was peeking cautiously from behind the clouds, colouring the rooftops and crooked branches of the bare trees in orange and pink, the whole world slowly taking shape again, stepping out of the shadows.

Claire bit her lip, purposely keeping her eyes anywhere but on Owen who was lying on a gurney bed, the jagged lines running across the multi-purpose monitor hanging on the wall beside him making her nauseated with worry and fear.

“Family?” The paramedic asked her a few hours ago when she first broke through the crowd that gathered around the crash site outside of the bar just as they were loading Owen, bloodied and unconscious, into an ambulance, its flickering red and blue lights blurred before her eyes.

She stared at him, unable to process the absurdity of the question at once.

What were they, really?

Even a year ago, even when they were practically living together, she wouldn’t have been able to define them in any terms that made sense. They never talked about it, too busy fending off hordes of reporters, court hearings, and overwhelming panic that seemed to have filled every crack and crevice crazing through their lives. Their relationship was just _there_. Was she his girlfriend? A partner in crime? A rebound of sorts after he’d lost his raptors – the closest thing he’d had to a family in years? Frankly, she never gave it much thought, deeming it unnecessary. They were not teenagers, eager to put labels on everything around them. They didn’t _need_ to be something or another for it to work.

Not that it did.   

Except now, she had to fit in a box, or they wouldn’t give her any information, and that was something she couldn’t stand the thought of.

“Yes,” she nodded. Her eyes darted inside the ambulance to see the other medic fuss over Owen, shielding him from her line of sight. “Living together.”

 _Were_.

In the past.

A long time ago.

But there was no one there to catch her on that lie, and so she received a brief update on Owen’s condition and was instructed to follow them in her car to the hospital where a stern nurse kept her in the waiting room before kicking her out altogether after he was transferred from the ER to the two-bed ward, telling her to come back during the visiting hours.

Claire was about to protest, but the fight didn’t seem worth it. She needed a shower. And coffee. And she also needed to find Owen’s insurance and social security card (because she still had copies – _she still had the goddamn copies_!) and bring them here.

When she returned a while later, feeling more tired than ever before, Owen was still asleep, and the bitter coffee from the vending machine in the hallway threatened to burn through her intestines without having any energizing effect on her whatsoever. She knew he was stable, not unconscious so much as sleeping after they put him on painkillers, but the sight of him – his skin unnaturally pale under the cuts and bruises on his face – lying so still unnerved her anyway, the slow rise and fall of his chest offering little comfort.

She wasn’t sure how long had she been just sitting there, staring at the wall, when Owen stirred at last just as she was about to maybe go get herself another cup of something that clearly wasn’t Arabica. His eyes fluttered open slowly, unfocused for a few long moments.

Claire felt the corners of her mouth tug up ever so slightly, so overcome with relief it made her weak in the knees. She dragged her chair closer to his bed just as his awareness seemed to have clicked into place, ignoring the commotion in the corridor that kept getting louder as the morning wore on.

“Hey.”

Owen swallowed with a wince. “Hey.” His voice was low and gruff, like talking was too much effort. His gaze darted around before fastening on hers again. “What happened?”

“You tell me,” Claire hummed, feeling her lips quiver as she tried to smile, her voice breaking a little. “The official story is that you crashed a motorcycle into a tree.”

This took a few more seconds to sink in. And then he grimaced. “Yeah… it didn’t sound like a good idea then, either.”

She sighed and shook her head, regarding him sternly now that he didn’t seem to be in imminent danger of actually dying and she was oh so tempted to unplug his monitors and whatever he was attached to for scaring the living hell out of her. And all for what? “Then why on Earth--”

He closed his eyes for a long moment. “To make all of the other things go away.”

“Jesus, Owen.”

He turned to her, two butterfly stitches on his forehead strikingly white on his skin. “How bad is it?”

“A concussion, two cracked ribs, and a dislocated shoulder,” she repeated the things the nurse had told her when she came back. Nothing to worry about, as so she’d been promised. He still looked like someone threw him into a meat processor first and then ran him over with a truck for good measure, though.

“Feels worse,” he admitted with a small smirk.

“Looks worse, too,” she assured him, leaning slightly forward on her elbows. His whole left cheek was one big bruise and his lower lip was cracked, a thin line of dried blood crossing it right in the middle. His knuckles were scabbed too, and for once, Claire was glad she couldn’t see the rest of the damage under his gown. “What were you thinking?” She couldn’t help but demand. “And where did you find a motorcycle?”

“I borrowed it,” he told her. “There was a guy at the bar…”

“Of course, you did,” Claire muttered.

“You aren’t really here, are you?” He croaked, studying her closely, his eyes narrowed ever so slightly, piercing blue in the fluorescent overhead light.

Puzzled, Claire blinked, at a loss for words by the second. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

His lips quirked into something resembling a smile. “You’re naked. It’s too good to be real.”

She arched an eyebrow and pointedly looked down at her pale blue sweater with an excessively large collar that was meant to double as a scarf. Hardly the sexiest outfit. Probably the second un-sexiest thing after a flour sack.

She glanced up at his IV bag. “What did they put you on?”

Owen sighed wearily. “Something good, apparently.”

His voice dropped, his eyelids growing heavy, and now that the worst was behind them and he was out of the woods, she suddenly had no idea what to do. Was she supposed to stay? To leave? Lying to his doctor when she didn’t really have a choice didn’t mean she had any moral right to be here. Wasn’t sure she wanted to have it, either. The last time she allowed herself the luxury of going for what she craved, it didn’t end well for either of them.  

“You should rest,” Claire said, all business – because what else was there to say? – feeling out of place, the room seemingly shrinking around them until it was the size of a shoebox. The second bed, the one closer to the door, was empty, but now she almost wished it wasn’t just the two of them in the small space crowded with hurt and unsaid words.

She started to get up, pushing herself off the chair, but Owen’s hand reached for hers, curling around her wrist, warm and familiar.

An old memory popped up in her mind, about one morning a long time ago when they were lying in bed because neither of them felt like getting up, talking about nothing in particular. She pressed her palm to his to see how much bigger his hand was compared to hers, how much darker his skin seemed from all the sun he never shied away from. His touch felt warm but different in texture, softer than she’d have imagined.

“Wanted to make sure you were real,” he said when their eyes met, his thumb running absently over the inside of her wrist, and Claire’s pulse tripped over itself under his touch, and she knew he couldn’t have possibly missed it. “’Cause I had this dream before. It never ends the way I want.”

This situation was hardly a laughing matter, but she couldn’t help letting out an amused snort. “This,” she glanced around, “is what you dream about?”

“You,” he shook his head so subtly she was half certain she imagined it. “But you’re always gone when I wake up.”

That was drugs talking, she told herself. And god only knew how much alcohol was still coursing through his system. And it was stupid and sentimental, and not something that would normally had any effect on her, whatever the circumstances – Claire wasn’t sure he even knew what was going on, which was probably for the best. But everything inside her went still even after his hand dropped on the blanket again.

“Try not to do anything stupid again, at least while you’re here,” she warned him, her voice high-pitched and unnaturally-sounding even to her own ears, too loud for this small room and its white walls and the cold day outside the window. She almost thought her words would shatter the glass, and the unforgiving December air would rush in and freeze the space between them.

“Are you gonna come back?” Owen asked in a whoosh of breath as she finally stood up.

Claire hesitated, her hand frozen over her jacket draped over the back of her chair in mid-reach.

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

\---

To say that Owen had a very vague recollection of what had happened the previous night would be an understatement.

He remembered leaving the Mitchells’ house, his whole being a jumble of mixed emotions fueled by his encounter with Claire. He hated her and needed her, resented her and knew that there was nothing she could do that he wouldn’t forgive. And more than anything, he missed her so bad it hurt to the point he could barely stand it. He despised and pitied himself for feeling that way, trapped in the kind of hell there was no escape from while a part of him wanted to stay in it for good, if only because feeling something was better than feeling nothing at all.

Then there was a bar, he knew that much. He could recall his first shot of tequila, and the second. The next half a dozen were a blur until sharp pain inside him reduced to a dull throb, the edges of reality around him smooth and no longer jagged. He remembered imagining calling her, which made sense, and then hearing her voice in his ear, which didn’t.

The night was quiet, the sky jet-black above his head when he tumbled into a parking lot, chilly air nipping at his cheeks. She told him not to move, and he was happy to comply, reveling in Claire’s voice washing over him. And then there was someone who he might have seen inside the bar talking about his pal’s Harley and moving in straight lines in the dark…

And then Claire again, all soft voice and worried eyes, telling him something that didn’t quite stick, and for a moment, he was overcome with the panic because everything was wrong and there were dark spots dancing before his eyes and his head was about to explode…

Afterwards, he’d been in and out of it most of the day, barely registering a nurse that would pop up seemingly out of nowhere to check his vitals and stick more needles into him, but every time Owen tried to ask her something, his mouth wouldn’t cooperate, his tongue too big and too heavy to be of any use. He was grateful for the small bits and pieces of memories flashing through his mind, but even more so for the deep black oblivion where he didn’t have to feel the ache that went way beyond the physical pain.

The fog had finally lifted by nightfall, the room coming into proper focus around him, which was a blessing in disguise because it was impossible to ignore the pulsing pain in every part of his body now that he knew where to look for it.

A nurse in her early 50’s with a cross face and knitted eyebrows came in again, muttering something about his _girlfriend_ who was apparently calling the hospital nonstop, and there was no universe in which _that_ made sense.

Queasy and nauseous, Owen asked for a glass of water, and then sweet-talked her into giving him his phone back, which required a bit more time and energy than he could spare, but he managed. She relented eventually, threatening to take it away for good if he short-circuited something (even though they both knew that if that were even a remote possibility, his phone would be taking a dive out the window right now).

The nurse walked out of his room with a huff, leaving him to his devices until the next check-up, and he closed his eyes and counted in his mind until the ringing in his ears ceased, drained by a three-minute conversation as if it was a 12-mile marathon.

His left shoulder was messed up, sharp pain shooting through it and into his back whenever Owen so much as shifted, rendering his whole left arm useless. It had been a while since he had dislocated anything, but the familiar dread of having to treat a part of his body like it was made of porcelain didn’t take long to settle in.

He had no one to call around here, certainly not at the time of the night, and as he scrolled through his contacts, taking mental note to contact his boss first thing in the morning (if he didn’t forget about it by then), it struck him how isolated he’d become lately. Funny how it wasn’t something one would usually ponder unless they were in a situation like this.

His finger hovered over Claire’s name, his mind trying to separate illusion from reality and failing shamelessly, plagued by the wishful thinking and everything he wanted so desperately to be true.

 _They don’t serve beer here_ , Owen texted her, his thumb moving over the keyboard as if on the will of its own. _Can u believe it?_

If he’d dreamed up the whole thing from earlier, he was screwed. The silver lining here was that it wouldn’t be that big a stretch to blame it on his concussion and disorientation and maybe some other crap he could probably pull out of his _warden_ the next time she stopped by to poke and prod at him.

Despite the late hour, the answer came a minute later.

 _You wouldn’t say! Maybe better luck with tequila? They do have a whole lot of tiny cups everywhere that can double as shot glasses_.

Owen’s lips quirked, and then he winced when something as simple as that nearly split his head in half.

 _Hard to read your tone all the way from here, but r u making fun of me?_ He sent next.

 _Me? Never!_ Claire responded without hesitation, and he could oh so clearly see her mock-insulted face, jaw dropped and eyes disbelieving at such a blatant accusation. And then, _How are you feeling, really?_

 _Like someone punched me in the brain_ , Owen admitted honestly.

 _After the stunt you pulled last night, the jury is still out on whether you even have one_.

 _U r just jealous cuz ur bed doesn’t have a remote control_ , he typed back, snorting.

The screen lit up mere seconds later. _Are you even allowed to operate heavy machinery with a head injury?_

 _It’s not that heavy_ , he protested, all righteous indignation. _Come back_ , he wanted to say _. Have you really been here? Is **this** real?_ Nothing seemed the way it used to be only yesterday, but whatever this was, it was a distraction that made him think of something other than the fact that if he took a deep breath, his ribs would probably puncture his lungs, and for that, Owen was grateful.

 _I was talking about your brain_ , Claire replied.

He fell asleep mid-text, lulled by the soft hum of the monitor above his head and the knowledge that at least one good thing came out of nearly having his skull cracked open.

\---

Claire came to see him the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. She read to him from the magazines she’d pick up in the waiting room - because he was not advised to do that on his own on account of his concussion, or watch TV, for that matter - until he’d beg her to stop, half-laughing and half-mortified by the contents of _Vogue_ and _Cosmopolitan_.

Sometimes, they’d talk – about her job, and his, and the hospital food that tasted like cardboard bathed in sauce, and the films he’d seen, and the books she’d read, artfully dancing around the only subject that neither dared to approach.

Owen was weak and woozy, tiring easily and slipping into sleep mid-sentence for hours at a time. The cuts on his face were healing fast but the bruises still lingered, turning purple and yellow around the edges. Owen claimed it didn’t hurt, but they both knew better than that.

She couldn’t stand watching him sleep, his exposed vulnerability splintering her heart, making it practically burst with uneasiness. This was when Claire would go to a Starbucks across the street to catch a breath, not quite certain of what the hell was happening here. She’d call Karen to clear her mind, or stop by the office even though she was not due to be back for another week. It was a relief to have her attention focused on something other than the hospital and the heaviness with which it pressed down on her.

“Why are you doing this?” Owen asked her one afternoon several days later while she was reading the dinner options aloud to him – apparently, he could choose from a few equally unappealing items and she was adamant to find the least gross food they served here.

“Because you look cross-eyed when you do it,” she scoffed. “How does the roast sound?”

“No, Claire, why are you _here_?”

She lowered the menu down to find Owen watch her quizzically, feeling oddly exposed without a piece of laminated paper and empty words between them.

He was half-sitting on the bed, its backrest lifted to accommodate him. Normally, Claire was the one who tended to read between the lines, but right now, there seemed to be lines between the lines between the lines, and she was lost. It had been too long and she must’ve forgotten how goddamn good he could be at loading his words with a hundred layers of meaning and leaving her with no clue as to how she was supposed to make sense of them.

“I mean, you don’t have to do it. Especially considering…” He trailed off.

She stared back at him for a long moment without breaking the eye contact, turning his words in her head like the Rubik’s Cube until they aligned properly.

“Remember the hotel in San Jose?” She asked.

His face scrunched in confusion. “Water stains on the walls and pigeon-sized mosquitos? I’d love to say no, but…” He chuckled and shook his head.

“You took a really good care of me there. The burns on my palm, the blisters – I didn’t even notice how bad they were.” She shrugged as if it explained everything, which it probably didn’t.

“So now I’m your charity case?” Owen quirked an eyebrow at her.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“You didn’t need me to take care of you,” he said after a few moments had passed. “Not then. Not ever.”

She took in a shaky breath, struggling not to look away. “Funny. I can’t remember when I didn’t not need it.” Her lips curved into a ghost of smile, and she pushed back from his bed. “You hungry? There’s a vending machine in the hall that has an amazing selection of Slim Jims.”

“Claire… Wait.” He made no attempt to reach for her, his hands closed around fistfuls of a blanket on his lap instead, and he huffed a breath through his nose. “About that night, when I came by--”

“Don’t,” she stopped him. If he wanted to have a second round of their screaming match, she might as well just up and leave, but even knowing that she could easily walk away and there’d be nothing Owen would be able to do about it felt like a small consolation. The situation still was like an open wound that everyone ignored, thus making the healing all the more impossible.

“No, it’s not that. I, ah… I wanted to apologize.” He said as he watched her closely, transfixed by the green of her eyes, her freckles brighter than the sun on her suddenly pale skin, the wisps of her red hair that escaped her ponytail that were framing her face. “There were things I should’ve never said. You were right. I couldn’t… _can’t_ possibly know what it was like for you.” Owen ran a hand down his face, feeling the scratchy beard with his palm. “It caught me by surprise – which, I know, is the worst excuse in the book. You did what you had to do. I just… I really hate…”

“Me?” Her direct look was unnerving.

He exhaled sharply, ignoring the way it resonated in his whole body, the faint echo of pain flashing in his ribs, his back, almost snagging his attention away – and Owen was willing to let it do it, to allow himself to focus on something less stiffening than this moment between them. “No, of course, not.” A corner of his mouth twisted into a not-quite-a-smile and he looked away from Claire and out the window behind which the sky was grey and heavy with a promise of snow, colouring the world in faded pastels. “I wasn’t here when you needed me the most, and I’ll never forgive myself for it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her nod slowly, although whether she was agreeing with him or merely acknowledging the fact that she’d heard him Owen couldn’t tell.

“I’m not trying to making about me, Claire, I swear,” he said, turning to her again. He swallowed as the mother of all headaches made home behind his eyes, pulsing into the back of his skull. The goddamn side effect of the past few days of his life. “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you even if I wanted to.” He grimaced a little. “I guess what I’m trying to say, in a very charming manner, is that I’m sorry. For everything. And if you ever need to talk or anything…”

She stayed quiet for a very long moments, before finally saying, “You know, I always thought that if it could work with anyone, it would be with you.”

\---

On New Year’s Eve, Owen’s temperature suddenly skyrocketed, catching them unawares and making the doctors suspect pneumonia. The fever, so bad Claire thought he’d burn through the bed, left him weak and barely coherent, trapping him in the nightmares whenever he’d slip into the uneasy, drugs-induced slumber.

She was kicked out of his room to wear out a patch of linoleum in the corridor, a snake of worry coiling in her stomach, while the medical personnel drew his blood for tests and pumped him with antibiotics to knock down his fever to a manageable level. In the end, it turned out being a minor infection, amplified by his weakened condition, and when the nurse told her that, Claire thought she was going to crumble with relief.

She stayed with him until way past midnight despite the protests of his doctor, a serious, no-nonsense man with a bushy moustache whose stubbornness almost matched her own, watching the colour of Owen’s cheeks slowly return to normal as he slept while the fireworks lit up the roofs outside the window in green and red and golden.

It was the sound of explosions in the sky that awoke him a while later, his gaze still glazed over, but his cheeks no longer crimson with fever. “What’s with the face?” Owen asked her wearily, officering Claire a weak smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Did someone die?”

And with that, she pressed her forehead to the back of his hand clasped in hers and cried.

On the 2nd of January, the Mitchells returned from Detroit, crowding Owen’s room at all hours of the day, bombing them both with questions and news and making it hard for Claire to avoid their curious looks even though they never asked anything directly. Instead, the boys told them that Scott had a Jacuzzi in his new house and a new stereo system in the living room, but the location of the place sucked, and Karen only shrugged at that. Grandma and Grandpa Mitchell were very generous with the presents, and both Zach and Gray shamelessly played the ‘children of the divorce’ card, apparently finding their true calling for the next few years.  

Claire took this as her cue to step back and stop spending every waking hour of her day in this white mausoleum and living off gross sandwiches from the vending machines. Honestly, if she never tasted anything of that kind ever again, it’d still be too soon.

Owen texted her. A lot. Sometimes, he was sharing anecdotes about the exciting hospital life and the things he’d overseen or overheard in the hallway, other times begging her to come save him from the overly enthusiastic kids. He was getting better fast, her ribs had healed and his face was no longer looking like someone used it as a punching bag. Which, naturally, made him restless, leaving him wandering around his floor and chatting up his fellow patients – something she couldn’t wrap her mind around.

She replied in monosyllabic words, blatantly lying about being swamped with work, unable to explain even to herself why she was doing it. Nothing had happened between them, save for the unspoken truce that smoothed out the rocky terrain of their undefined relationship. Yet, the appearance of her family somehow burst the bubble they’d been living in for the past week, and she didn’t know why it was making her simultaneously relieved and wistful.  

However, when Owen was finally released, it was Claire who showed up at the hospital with a bag of spare clothes for him and an offer to drive him home.

“You don’t have to do it,” Owen said as he walked out of the bathroom, looking slightly more normal than he did in the past ten days, albeit still weary around the edges.

He needed to wear a sling around his injured shoulder that still was a little sore, and Claire helped him fix it, straightening it behind his neck and snapping the clip into place.

“Would you rather Sheryl do it?” She asked nonchalantly, pointedly tugging at the strap as if to make sure it would hold and not meeting his eyes. “She offered.”

“Sharon,” Owen corrected her, not without amusement.

“Right,” she said flatly, levelling him with a chilly glare.

Sharon was a preppy twenty-something that worked evenings at the shelter, hers and Owen’s shifts often overlapping apparently. She’d stopped by a couple of times, always when he was asleep, offering to bring _cookies-coffee-whatever_ and setting Claire’s teeth on edge with her not so subtle interest. It was below her to ask Owen directly if there was anything going on between him and the girl, and the fact that she had no right to care about the answer, whatever it was, was hanging over her like a stormy cloud.

“If I didn’t know any better--” Owen started, his eyes crinkling with barely contained laughter.

“We’re still at the hospital, Owen.” Claire smiled brightly at him and patted him on the chest before stepping back. “Don’t make me put you on life support.”

\---

His house was warm. Someone – Claire, he suspected – turned up the heating before bringing him over. The relief of being back and in his element again almost left him aching. As someone whose life had been a nonstop chaos for the past decade and a half, Owen found the change of his newly established routine surprisingly unsettling, the limitations of the hospital making him all but climb walls from restlessness and unease.

If only it wasn’t his own stupidity that got him there in the first place…

Claire checked the thermostat and turned to him, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Well, looks like you’re all set,” she announced. “Should I return this to Gray?”

“Huh?” He blinked and focused on a house key in her hand. “Sure. Of course.”

She nodded and put it in her pocket. “Okay, then…”

“Can I get you something? Coffee, maybe?”

And there it was again, the smile she wasn’t able to hold back. “I appreciate the offer, but I think I respect myself too much to ever touch the concoction you generously call coffee again.”

Owen smirked. “Wakes you right up.”

“Burns right through you,” Claire scoffed, rolling her eyes. In the early afternoon light streaming through the windows framing the front door, she looked radiant, her cheeks flushed from the brief walk from the car to the doorstep. And then she drew in a breath and  straightened her back, somehow more detached and composed by the moment. _In control_. “Rest,” she instructed. “And if you feel dizzy and nauseous again--”

She grabbed hold of the bag in his hand – the one that he was adamant to carry from the car on the grounds of not being a ‘complete invalid, Claire!’ – and pulled at it to help him put it down or something else equally ridiculous, but Owen didn’t let go of it. “Claire, stop. I’m not dying. I’ve had a concussion before.”

“Yeah, well… that explains a lot,” she noted dryly and he hummed under his breath, and for a few long moments, they simply looked at one another in silence.

“Thanks.” Owen said at last. His voice dropping, not sounding amused anymore. “I mean, I don’t even _know_ how to thank you. For everything you’ve done… in this past week and... if there’s anything, I mean… I don’t know what I would’ve--”

His earnestness made her throat close up. The fact that they were so painfully undefined in their _situation_ , teetering on a brink and flailing their arms as they danced around it, blindfolded, was disconcerting. Her stomach churning, Claire lifted her chin, suddenly feeling lightheaded and hoping it wasn’t showing. “Just do me a favor. The next time something stupid pops up in your mind – reconsider.”

She gave the bag one last tug, but so did he at the same time, pulling her toward him - or maybe pulling himself toward her, it was damn hard to tell - and the next thing she knew, his lips were pressed to hers, and she was drowning.

The shock of his mouth moving against hers, soft and warm and familiar, caught her momentarily off guard, her mind flooded with incoherent surprise and panic – not over the fact that he was kissing her, but because she was relieved it happened. And when he began to pull away, quite possibly misreading her reaction, she gripped the front of his jacket, drawing him down again, closer. A low growl formed in the back of his throat, and her lips parted willingly.

His arm still trapped between them, Owen dropped the bag at their feet and slid his good hand up her shoulder and into her hair, braiding his fingers through it, cupping the back of her head as his tongue darted between her teeth. She tasted of peaches, and sugar, and winter, and _Claire_ , and maybe it was the right time to call an ambulance again because he was indeed feeling fucking dizzy, his blood on fire. 

“You were saying?” He murmured when she broke away from him, panting and flustered, her fingers clutching at his overcoat.

“Owen, I should--” She gulped for air, her eyes glassy.

“Stay.” He brushed a kiss to her temple, breathing her, his heart _boom-boom-booming_ against his ribs and threatening to undo the careful attempts of the medical personnel at putting him back together piece by piece. “Don’t go.”

Claire pulled at his collar until their foreheads were pressed together, her eyes locked with his and her breath coming out in short, raspy puffs. “I should go get my phone from the car.”

Owen refused to go to bed on account of having just been trapped in one for ‘more than humanly endurable’, ignoring her tight-lipped expression and the way she was glaring daggers at him, probably waiting for him to drop dead from unpacking his dirty clothes and starting a pot of coffee. In the end, as a compromise, he found himself stretched out on the couch in the living room, perched precariously on the edge of it with Claire snuggled between him and the cushions, his good arm wrapped around her and their lips engaged in slow, tender kisses.

“Are you really back?” Claire whispered.

He pressed a kiss to the top of her forehead, his fingers trailing slowly up and down her arm. “Feels real enough to me.”

“No, I mean… if you’re going to leave again in a week--” She was tracing a button on his shirt with her fingertips, purposely looking straight ahead, very aware all of a sudden of a dull thudding of his heart beneath her palm, his energy almost palpable. So alive.

“I won’t,” Owen said, letting out a long exhale. “I needed to get it out of my system, see what I’ve been missing since I quit. See if it was worth it.” There was an edge to his words, although whether it was bitter or rueful, even he wasn’t sure. "But I really am back now.”

At that, Claire turned her head up, weighing the words in her head before they came tumbling out of her mouth. She swallowed, uncertain and antsy, wishing she didn’t have to ask. “And you’re okay with…” Her bottom lip caught between her teeth, she watched him with a mixture of concern and anticipation.

It took her words a moment or two to click. “Yeah.” He brushed her hair back from her face. “Yeah, I am. Are you?”

That was not something she thought about a lot, choosing to suppress her feelings and lock them up in the deepest, darkest corner of her heart where neither she, nor anyone else would ever see them. Where she hoped they would find peace, probably long before she did. Claire was not sorry for making the decision about the baby, even though she did _wonder_ now and then. What she did regret was having to face it at all. Inevitability didn’t make it any less painful, scratching at her guts whenever she’d so much as take the wrong step and venture into the barren land of ‘what if’.

They met in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and maybe under different circumstances, and if their edges weren’t so sharp, tearing at one another, and if the stars were aligned in a better way, it could have actually worked out on the first try. What happened was that they did the best they could with what they had, Claire wanted to believe that much, even if the end result all but destroyed them both.

She nodded and settled back down, relaxing into Owen, his shirt soft under her cheek.

“Can I ask you something?” He started after a while, playing absently with her hair splattered across her back. Another nod. “About the baby… How did it happen? I mean, when did we…”

“Ah, that time when you came by to pick up your stuff. After you’ve already moved out.”

When she asked him for some time to think everything over, he packed up his bag the very same day despite her offer to stay until he found a place of his own, choosing to bunk over with someone from work. Their relationship had been rather strained already, although, despite the initial relief over not having to wade through the heavy silences that hung between them, she couldn’t help but feel like he couldn’t get away from her fast enough, a painful pang resonating deep inside her at the thought.

He came back the following Saturday for everything he didn’t take the first time around, mostly some books and DVDs, the forgotten toiletries. Except instead of leaving, he kissed Claire with so much hunger it all but broke her in half. And just liked that, the afternoon turned into the evening that turned into the night as they tried to lose themselves in one another and fill the bottomless void in the only way that made sense to them at the time.

“Really?”

She could swear she _heard_ his eyebrows arch. They never quite acknowledged that day, as if stopping by for 10 minutes and not leaving until the next morning was ow it meant to happen from the start. For a while, she thought of it as some sort of closure, until one day, even before taking the test, she became acutely aware of a tiny wink of new life inside her.

“Mm-hm.”

Claire told him more then, everything she could bear to recount, some of the memories smudged from time and her efforts to scrub them out of her mind. It didn’t sting as much as it did at first anymore, the whole experience starting to feel more like a scar that would let itself be known with the change of the weather instead of throbbing nonstop. Although the words still lodged uncomfortably in her throat as she spoke, refusing to come out, and she knew he could hear it.

“Did you really think I’d never come back?” Owen asked softly, tracing soothing circles on her back. It was gnawing at him more than anything else. Somehow, knowing that he’d given her this little reason to trust him hurt more than taking a goddamn bullet.

“I don’t know,” she admitted honestly, wriggling in his embrace to press her face into his neck, feeling his rapid pulse against her forehead.

At the time, either answer was equally unbearable. She couldn’t stand thinking of never seeing him again, but didn’t dare to wait for his return, suspended in a weird limbo of denial and deliberate isolation, barely ever allowing herself the luxury of hoping for something better, something that lay on the other side of a vast black nothingness her life had turned into.

Owen was watching her, she could feel it, her skin prickling with the static under his gaze. Could feel the questions rolling around in his head, too. A total mess…

“So, where does it leave us?” He murmured.

“Right where we started, I guess.” If there was any other answer, she didn’t know it.

After that, Claire asked him about where he’d been, and he told her about the base at the Gulf – scorching hot air, white sand, the sun so bright and the sea so blue they didn’t seem real. Falling into the old routine was easy, like stepping into the old shoes and knowing they wouldn’t leave blisters. It was, perhaps, the only post-incident thing that made him feel stable and grounded, and not floating thirty feet above the ground.

It didn’t feel entirely right though, like a good copy that was almost identical to the original, except the depth and the substance were missing. But when Claire asked why, he brushed it off, blaming it on the park and his inability to snap back into his old lifestyle as easily as he’d hoped he would.

He never told her about trying to call her – about a hundred times – punching in the number but never allowing the calls to go through.

\---

“Are you sure you don’t have anything five sizes smaller?”

When Claire stepped out of the bathroom dressed in his shirt and sweatpants that she had to roll down a few times to make sure they wouldn’t slide down her hips, Owen had already changed into his sleepwear and was now closing the curtains in the bedroom to block out the light of a streetlamp outside. A wide grin spread across his face when he turned to her. He plopped down onto the edge of the bed and pulled Claire toward him by the strings of the sweatpants until she was standing between his parted knees.

“You look good,” he assured her, placing his hands on her waist and looking suspiciously like a kid in a toy store, what with the coy grin and undisclosed glee in his eyes.

She hummed and peered down at him, sizing him up. “You don’t _really_ need constant observation, do you?”

“There’s only one way to find out.” He tugged her closer and pressed his lips to her stomach through the shirt, the worn fabric soft against his skin, never breaking the eye contact. “What if I… hemorrhage in my sleep?”

There was a hint of accusation in her eyes, but she didn’t stop him when he kissed her belly again, and his eyes crinkled with amusement over her not quite displeasure.

“Owen…” she started with a warning just the same as his thumbs started drawing slow circles on her sides.

“Hey,” he bunched her shirt with his hands, snagging her attention. “Nothing’s gonna happen that you don’t wanna happen, okay?” His expression turned serious. “I just want you here.”

Claire sighed after a moment and leaned down, cupping his face in her palms and kissing him quickly on the minty lips. “Get in bed, Romeo.”

Several hours later, Owen woke up to the sound of her weeping quietly in her sleep. At first, he thought it was an echo of his own dream until he registered a changed pattern of her breathing, a slight tremor of her body next to his. It must have been what awoke him in the first place. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Alarmed, Owen touched her shoulder. “Claire?” He scooted closer to her, brushing the strands of her hair that escaped a ponytail she tied at the nape of her neck from her face. “Claire…” It used to happen a lot in the first few weeks after the park, the memories often not violent enough to yank her out of her slumber, keeping her hostage in a place where there was no escape from.

“Shh,” he whispered against her temple. “It’s okay.”

She awoke slowly, blinking sleepily in the dark, her breathing short and uneven. “Owen?”

“You were crying,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry…” Claire started, wiping her cheek with her palm, surprised to find it wet.

“S’over.” Owen pressed his lips to her cheekbone, kissing away the tangy salt of her tears. He trailed his way to the corner of her mouth, murmuring words of comfort between the pecks until she calmed, and when Claire turned her face up, he took it as an invitation to kiss her fully on her lips, swallowing her soft sigh.

She wiggled around, shifting until she was stretched beneath him. Her hands slipped into the collar of his shirt and around his neck, fingers gripping the hairs on the back of his head, her back arched to press closer to him. Owen’s hand slid under the hem of her shirt, and the touch of his palm to her ribs sent a ripple of shiver through her body, a low whimper rising in her throat.

“Owen…”

“It’s okay,” he promised her.

“You’re hurt.” Claire swallowed, hard, her heart pulsing in her throat.

He nuzzled her cheek, his breath hot on her skin. “Need you,” he rasped, his awareness tunneling momentarily, the world falling back around them.

She helped him take off his shirt and allowed him to pull hers off over her head, discarding them to the floor as their mouths clashed against one another once again, his low growl vibrating into Claire, leaving her trembling all over. Her fingers skimmed over his chest, lips curling at the sound of his sharp inhale. Rising and swelling beneath him, she dragged her nails along his skin, her fingers digging into his flesh. Owen stiffened, a string of muttered curses falling from his lips.

“Sorry,” she murmured, loosening her grip. She brushed a tentative kiss to his shoulder spattered with bruises that were yet to fade, to the pulse point in the crook of his neck. “Sorry.”

A hand under her chin, Owen turned her face to him, claiming her lips against, deeper, longer, slower, savoring the taste and the feel of her, eager and willing and desperate to devour her whole.

“God, you’re so beautiful,” he breathed out against her collarbone, peppering his way down her body with slow, deliberate kisses, searing each and every single one of them into her skin as his fingers were tugging and pulling at her pants in haste and impatience, his boxer shorts long gone, an unwanted barrier.

Claire’s eyes fluttered closed, hands clutching the sheets, hips moving ever so slightly in sync with his quest, suspended in the tidal rise of pleasure surging through her in scalding waves. The touch of his mouth and his stubble to the tender, silky skin between her hipbones ripped a moan of protest through her. Not enough. Never enough…

And then it was all gone, leaving her feel cheated. Her eyes flew wide open to find Owen hovering over her, his gaze dark, pupils blown with want. Asking for permission. She pushed up from the pillows, reaching for him with her whole body. Her arm snaked around his neck, legs wrapping around his hips, taking him in in one long slide, her gasp of shock morphing into his groan. A perfect fit, Owen used to joke, but she didn’t feel like laughing now, holding on to him, skin slick beneath her fingers, their breaths mingling, the memory of the flesh stronger than the one of the mind.

He lowered her back into the sheets, thoughts stuttering, sensory overload threatening to push his whole being into oblivion. Home. He was home at last. Face pressed into her neck, he nudged his hips into a luscious rock, setting into the right rhythm after a few crazy collisions. She didn’t last, falling apart around him, a sweet whimper of release zinging through him, her fingers buried in his hair, digging into his back, leaving long scratch marks on his skin. And before he knew it, the delicious squeeze and the aftershocks contracting around him were ripping fire up and through him, mixed with an overwhelming sense of possession.

Good. So very good…

“If you hurt yourself, I’m going to kill you,” Claire informed him, slowly regaining her ability to form coherent thoughts again.

She was curled up against him, half draped over his chest, careful not to put too much pressure on anything that had been injured in the accident. Owen shifted and raised his head to kiss the top of her head, the heat of his body making the fine hairs on her arms stand on end. “Worth it,” he mumbled against her skin.

“Missed you.” Her fingers weaver through his, squeezing his hand, her thumb running over his knuckles.

He let out a long breath, his body deflating to wrap completely around hers, nose rubbing into her back on her neck, breathing in the scent of her skin mixed with the delicate notes of her shampoo and sex and everything that was Claire. “Mmm, you wouldn’t say.”

“It tickles,” she giggled, but made no attempt to move away, sinking instead into him with a content sigh.

“Missed you, too.” Absently, he pulled the hair tie from her hair, releasing it, looping his fingers through soft curls, listening to her breathing become slower and deeper, his own mind liquefied. It was hard to imagine now that they’d gone without this for as long as they had. Unfathomable. His palm skittered across her belly, lips pressed to her temple.  

There was an edge of desperation to this, to _them_ , reminding him too much of the times when they would look for solace in each other because it didn’t exist anywhere ease, until they ripped one another apart completely, the pieces too small and too scattered to put them back together. But Owen pushed his worries back, too happy and elated to allow himself to think of anything but this moment and Claire dozing off next to him, tucked into the curve of his body. Not yet.

\---

When Owen returned home after his very first tour with the NAVY, there was a certain degree of surrealism to the world. Nothing was wrong with it, per se, but nothing was right, either. Kind of like the way one would feel in Disneyland – pretend all you want that there was Sleeping Beauty in that pink castle and Mickey Mouse was an actual giant mouse and not a person in a costume, but it didn’t make any of it any more real.

He’d walk down the street and feel like he was stuck in Magic Kingdom – sheltered and protected from the horrors he’d just been exposed to, even if he was anything but.

Right now, it wasn’t quite the same. Not really. But his body felt battered in a frighteningly familiar way, and the fact that this was the third morning in a row that Claire woke up in his bed added another layer of dubiousness to his life.

“Claire, phone!” Owen poked his head into the steam-filled bathroom, her shrieking iPhone in his hand.

“Can you take it?” Her voice, muffled behind the shower curtain, broke through the sound of the running water. “Tell them I’ll call them back?”

When Claire came down to the kitchen, wrapped in one of his loose plaid shirts and still toweling off her hair, Owen was perched on one of the two mismatched bar stools – something he needed to fix but didn’t have time to.

“Hey, where do you keep the hair drier?” She asked lightly. And then her smile, sunny and bright, dimmed when she took in his grim expression, the tight set of his jaw. She lowered her hand. “What happened?”

Slowly, Owen set her phone on the counter, staring at it with a mixture of contempt and dismay. “Aaron- _something_ called,” he said calmly, his voice oddly detached. “They need you to come by the office to sign the transfer papers.” He looked up slowly, his face an emotionless mask. “So they could book the tickets and arrange your move.”

She froze as the scattered, panicky thoughts started to bump around her head. “Owen…”

“Were you planning on telling me?” He asked almost casually, like they were talking about the weather. _Sure, honey, don’t forget the umbrella. It might rain today_. “Or would’ve you just sent me a post card from Boston? You know, _after_ the fact?”

Her shoulders sagged defiantly, a resigned breath escaping her chest. “Don’t say that. Can I explain?”

He slid off the stool and brushed past her without so much as a second glance her way, grabbing his car keys from the desk on his way to the door. “I gotta go to work. Lock up when you leave.”

“Owen, come on,” Claire started helplessly, but he was didn’t even pause, gone before she could say another word.

**To be continued...**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, what do you think? Comments and kudos are much appreciated!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it’s my birthday, but it’s you guys who’s getting a treat :) Not that anyone asked for it, but it’s been a year since I finished this story, and it’s my second favourite fic I wrote for Clawen, so... I guess it deserves a proper ending.

_The only thing worse than having a pity party was perhaps having a pity party organized for you by someone else._

_Just how pathetic was she, Claire wondered, sitting across the table from Karen in a small café, that her sister had the urge to do that. Yet, for once, it felt easier to simply comply instead of coming up with more excuses that kept towering over her, threatening to collapse any moment and bury her under their weight._

_“I’m glad you could make it,” Karen said after the waitress brought over their coffee and chicken salad sandwiches._

_Claire pulled her cup closer but didn’t touch the food, her stomach churning at the smell of the dressing. “Yeah, sorry, I’ve been--”_

_“Busy, I know,” Karen nodded._

_Claire cleared her throat before they jumped into the old argument about avoidance and all kinds of other crap Karen seemed to be an expert at spotting lately. “I got the job.”_

_That got her sister’s attention. Karen put down her coffee, gaping at Claire with a mixture of disbelief and hope. “Really?”_

_“It’s no big deal. I just need something to keep my mind off…” She trailed off and focused on stirring her coffee._

_Karen nodded. “So, how are you doing?”_

_Claire hated that part. Not the question so much as the way it sounded – like she was dying, or being forced to wear an ugly sweater for a family photo._

_“Good, actually.” She admitted, looking up again. “The public hearings are finally over.” Frankly, hearing her name on TV was starting to get tiring, and the end of official investigation felt like a much-needed relief._

_“And what about, ah… Owen?”_

_The mention of his name stung, but Claire shrugged it off. “I’m sure he is aware about it as well.”_

_Karen regarded her apprehensively. “No, I mean… you okay with him leaving?”_

_Claire’s face fell. “With him what?”_

_Karen looked guilty and maybe mildly panicked for a moment, and so much more sympathetic than Claire could bear, her throat tight. She was suddenly feeling sick, too overwhelmed with the chatter around them and the bitter smell of coffee mixed with the scent of cinnamon and eggs hanging in the air._

_“You didn’t know? He left, Claire.”_

\---

The house was quiet when Owen walked through the door, but Claire’s car was in the driveway, and it didn’t take him long to find her in the living room, curled up in the armchair, one knee pulled up to her chest. She was staring vacantly at something outside the window, her eyes puffy like she’d been crying, and maybe it was just the lighting, but his chest squeezed at the sight of it nonetheless, a fierce pang of protectiveness shooting through him like a bolt of lightning.

His own brain hurt from the sheer amount of thinking, his thoughts no clearer than when he’d cut their conversation short this morning. In the seven hours between then and now, he’d managed to calm down and see that he had overreacted, driven by fear of losing her, however Claire never answered his texts, her phone going straight to voicemail when he called. Thus, by the time he got back from work, there was nothing left inside him but overwhelming panic, so strong it settled deep in his bones, rendering him rigid to the core and utterly terrified.

“You stayed here all day?” Owen asked for lack of better ideas, and grimaced at how it came out – all wrong and cold and business-like, as if she was an unwanted guest. He didn’t mean it like that, his voice grating even to his own ears.

“No,” Claire shook her head, not quite looking at him. He didn’t move. She bit her bottom lip, eyebrows pulled together, and then let out a soft sigh. “Just thought we could talk when you came back. I’d like to clarify the situation before—The last time we had a mild misunderstanding, you disappeared for months.” She cut off and he flinched. “I wasn’t going anywhere. I’m not. They made me an offer, I said I’d think about it. That’s all there ever was.”

Owen frowned, watching her closely – the gentle slope of her nose, two studs in her left ear. Puzzled and so world-weary he feared he might collapse right there and then, he exhaled through his nose, his hand running over the scruff on his cheek.

“Then why--”

“Just in case.” She finally turned to him, her expression tired. “It’s a standard procedure because it really doesn’t take long to add my name to the transfer agreement for _if_ I decided to say yes.”

He looked away, one hand on his hip and another pinching the bridge of his nose, willing the pounding headache away. He’d never felt like such a complete idiot. Certainly not in the recent past.

“I’m sorry.” Chagrined under her stare, Owen cleared his throat. “Look, I didn’t--”

“You really thought I’d do that?” It was meant to be a question, but it hardly sounded like one. She pushed herself up to stand and reached for her purse. “Because it’s what _you_ did?”

Owen’s hand dropped to his side, his shoulders sagging under the weight of her accusation, which still felt like a sucker punch even though it was true. “That’s not fair.”

“Life is hardly ever fair,” she noted flatly, not looking like she needed his answer. “I know, trust me. I was right there every time it screwed _me_ over.”

“I’m not the one keeping secrets, Claire.”

He regretted the words the moment they came out of his mouth.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have to if I didn’t have to chase after you to tell you things,” she fired back.

“Okay, I admit I shouldn’t have jumped to—” He sucked in a sharp breath. In that moment, Claire could hear the wheels in his head turn – scattered, panicky half-thoughts churning and grating against one another. “What was I supposed to think?” He asked helplessly.

She bristled momentarily, his question making her hackles stand on end. It wasn’t even what he thought so much as how fast he’d assumed the worst that turned her wistfulness into anger, and then deep weariness. It was like they kept bumping into one another, moving around without any sense of direction, and it frightened Claire how breakable their little world turned out to be, how fragile and insubstantial.

Part of her wanted to believe they were past this mistrust and doubts, but knowing that they weren’t left her in this odd, unfamiliar place she didn’t know the way out of.

“I don’t know, Owen,” she breathed out. “Maybe you were supposed not to look for more excuses to blame me for something or wait for me to mess up. Take your pick.”

With that, she stepped around him, a whiff of her perfume enveloping him like a cloud.

“You’re leaving?” Desperate as he was for an end of this conversation, this wasn’t what he had in mind. He followed her into the hallways, franticly trying to find the right words to get her to stay. “Claire, I’m sorry. Don’t go, please. Can we… can we talk about it?”

“I can’t do this now,” she said quietly, stuffing her phone into the pocket of her jeans. “I was not trying to get back at you, if that’s what you were thinking, but I can’t deal with you looking for hidden motives in everything I say or do.” Her eyes were bright when they met his, but there was certain, calm determination to her that felt frighteningly final.

“It wasn’t that--” Owen started and faltered. Swallowed past a lump in his throat. “Claire...” Her name fell from his lips like a plea.

“You don’t trust me, and maybe I don’t trust you, either.” A short, humorless bark of a laugh escaped her chest, a bitter, sharp sound that slashed through both of them. “If I were, I wouldn’t be imagining an emergency bag in the trunk of your car, packed and ready to go. And if that really is the case, then what’s the point of all of this?”

“Do you really think that?” He asked her softly, watching her reach for her coat and her car keys, too dumbfounded to react, or even think straight.

“We both do,” Claire muttered, fumbling with her purse, pushing her hair back. Pointedly not looking at him. “Always have.”

\---

“Aunt Claire? You think they’re okay?” Gray asked, kicking at the fresh snow with the toe of his boot as he walked beside her, purposely avoiding the cleared path, his nose red from the cold.

“Huh?” She tilted her head, trying to keep up with the fountain of his energy.

He glanced up at her. “The animals. On the island.”

They never talked about the park anymore, not after the case officially got closed and there was no need for either of them to bring it up ever again. It was almost hilarious, really, the way they used to dance around the topic – as if a dinosaur could break through a wall and burst into a room if they didn’t shove this subject as far away as they possibly could. Tiptoeing on the dinosaur eggshells, as Claire used to call it – never out loud, though.

But the anniversary spiked up the interest of the press again, drawing the public’s attention to the island. The company had no choice but to reveal the footage from what used to be the most ambitious establishment in the world – the handlers and the construction crew working on cleaning up the mess, tending to the animals. This, in turn, immediately attracted the animal rights activists, which, of course, resulted in a massive feud between them and the people who wanted to burn down the whole island and be done with it for good.

As a result, the current COO of Masrani Global, together with none other than Ian Malcolm, did an interview with Anderson Cooper last night, praising and condemning the place for 40 minutes. She considered not watching it, mindful of a major setback she’d gone through the last time she allowed herself to get sucked into the park’s affairs, but a glass of wine helped her get through it without feeling sick in her stomach or throwing her TV out the window, which she proclaimed a major success. The show was full of big words and soundbites, and the PR teams on both sides were probably crying with pride.

Claire toasted to herself when the credits started to roll and her name hadn’t been mentioned once.

It left a bad aftertaste nonetheless, and when Gray, somewhat distressed after watching the report (which, Claire suspected, Karen didn’t approve of) showed up at her place this morning, she didn’t have it in her to pretend that nothing happened and send him off to school.

She took him out for brunch instead, and they successfully avoided talking about Malcolm or the park for a few hours. Until now.

“I’m sure they are,” Claire said, watching him climb onto the bench, hop off it once he reached the end, climb onto the next one – and so on, until the lane ran out of benches.

And for once, she wasn’t lying. She really did think the animals were doing great. They were, after all, the most valuable assets the company was owning, and whatever Masrani Global was planning for them, it was in their best interest to take the absolute best care of the species they created.

She didn’t tell that to Gray, though, choosing to stick to explaining that, of course, they were being taken care of because it wasn’t the animals’ fault that the tragedy unfolded the way it did. All they did was follow their instinct, and the whole point of having trained professionals there now was to ensure that they were healthy and happy. It was hard to tell if he bought it entirely, but the crease between his eyebrows smoothed out.

After Owen, Gray was perhaps the most concerned of them all for the fate of the island, and Claire knew that the news about the island affected him deeply – much to Karen’s dismay. Still, on some level, Claire felt responsible for keeping his worries at bay. After everything she’d inadvertently put him and Zach through, it was probably the least she could do.

They were nearing the gate when Gray’s face lit up and he sprinted forward, propelled forward by excitement and all the sugar she allowed him to have earlier – the boy was a fan of breakfast food! And when Claire followed him with her gaze, she spotted Owen’s SUV parked next to her car. He was leaning on the hood, squinting in the harsh wind, the collar of his jacket turned up against the cold.

He fist-bumped Gray when the boy bounced over to him, seemingly just as pleased by the encounter as Gray was. Even from twenty feet away, Claire could hear her nephew launch into a detailed catch-up, barely pausing to take a breath, his grin bright and contagious. He paused only briefly when her shadow fell over him.

“Honey, why don’t you wait for me in the car?” Claire told Gray when she finally reached them, handing him the keys.

Chuckling, Owen pulled the boy’s hat over his eyes before as the latter waved his goodbye.

“Are you stalking me?” She asked Owen, stuffing her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat. It came out lighter than she expected though, a curious comment rather than an accusation, the days spent apart managed to abate the storm of their fight.

He jerked his chin toward the building across the street. “I work here.” His eyebrows arched, and now that he said it, she noticed a shelter’s logo on the front pocket of his shirt, peeking from beneath his unbuttoned coat. “Are _you_ stalking me?”

Claire looked away before he noticed a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth against her will. “The park was Gray’s idea,” she noted.  

“Sure. Let’s blame everything on the kid,” Owen agreed easily as if it was their inside joke. “I just…” He shuffled his feet, stalling. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. You wouldn’t return my calls...”

“Most people would take a hint,” she suggested without malice, turning to him again. It was an awkward kind of dance, not entirely familiar to either of them anymore. The anger that flared up so fast inside her during their conversation a few days ago had long morphed into wistful longing. It truly hurt to think that after everything they’d been through, there was still some room left for pettiness and mistrust.

In the messages he left on her phone since then, he was apologizing profusely for being such an idiot (his words, not Claire’s), his voice scared and desperate, his plea for forgiveness making her heart ache. And she started to wonder… Where was the line between a minor setback and a major, life-altering confrontation? Weird as it sounded, it wasn’t as defined as one might think.

Owen’s lips twitched into a rueful smile. “Well, you know me. I never learn.”

Claire glanced back. Gray was sitting in the passenger seat of her car, his nose buried in his phone – playing Angry Birds, she presumed – not at all perplexed by the interruption of their ‘out and about’.

“I wanted to apologize,” Owen added quieter when she didn’t say anything. “I overreacted and I’m sorry.” He caught her gaze and held it. “You’re the last person in the world I’d want to hurt, and it seems like it’s the only thing I’ve been doing ever since we met.” He rubbed his neck, ran his fingers through his hair. “I trust you, Claire. You’re the only one I trust, but when I heard this guy say that—Look, I’m not a complete moron, most of the time. I know there’s nothing I can offer you. Nothing that counts.” A pause. “But I don’t want to lose you. And it was stupid, and I miss you, and I’m sorry.”

“You’ve already said that,” she noted softly in a whoosh of breath that got swept away by a gust of wind.

He grimaced. “Yeah, I had the whole speech and all, but it sounded better in my head.”

“It sounded alright.” She considered him for a long moment. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I already had everything I needed?”

He let out a rueful half-laugh. “Maybe it would. If you stayed in the shower for a couple more minutes and I had a chance to think it through.”

Claire smirked, shaking her head. “You really are a moron.”

“This almost sounds like you’re not kicking me to the curb just yet.” His words were full of poorly suppressed hope what left Claire feeling warm all over, her fingertips tingling.

“Easy, Cujo. The decision is still pending,” she cooled him down, although not as sternly as she meant.

The line of his shoulders relaxed visibly nonetheless, his expression a mix of relief and amusement. “How about I take you out for dinner sometime? You know, clean slate and all that.”

Claire paused, studying him in the harsh winter sun that did little to hide the tired lines around his eyes. This close to him, her resolve was crumbling, and if she wasn’t giving in to it just yet, she knew she would be soon. “I’ll think about it,” she promised, knowing that it sounded more like a _yes_ than a _maybe_. Hoped he knew it, too.

He was trying, they both were. Maybe their efforts, if nothing else, deserved another chance.

The next night, she showed up at his place with a bottle of wine, radiating jittery, nervous energy, which earned her raised eyebrows and a curious once-over from Owen once he opened the door, and it was only then that it occurred to her that she didn’t quite think this through, not past this moment.

“That thing you said about taking me out for dinner…” Claire started in lieu of a greeting, breathless from the dance that her heart was doing in her chest.

“Yeah?” Arms folded over his chest, he leaned against the doorframe.

“How about we stay in and cook something instead, probably burn it and order Thai food?” As far as olive branches went, this wasn’t the worst one she could offer, or so she hoped.

He stepped out onto the porch and wrapped his arm around her, pulling her against his chest. “Thank you,” he whispered, pressing a long kiss to the top of her head.

\---

Claire Dearing was anything but a fatalist. She believed in working hard and getting things done, followed by even harder work if she didn’t like the results the first time around. She believed in human mistakes and making decisions, and not blaming them on the alignment of the stars. There were rewards and consequences to her actions, and sometimes it was hard to tell them apart but she was trying to learn not to be defined by either of them. God knew, she’d spent years of her life doing just that, and it never got her anywhere.

It was funny how the life refused to be divided into black and white only.

Whichever category her thing with Owen fell into – a reward or a consequence - the only thing Claire knew for sure was that it was feeling good. Somewhere deep inside – so deep she did her best not to venture there unless she had no other choice but to do it – she was certain that if someone asked her to go back in time and undo _that_ day a year ago at the expense of everything she had in her life now, she wouldn’t go for it. Not a chance. Good thing, it was only a hypothetical possibility.

“You should take it,” Owen said one night as she was going through her notes for the meeting in the morning while he was watching _The Amazing Race_ on TV.

Sprawled on his couch with her legs stretched over his lap, Claire looked at him over a stack of paper in her hands. “Take what?”

“The job. In Boston.” He watched her quietly for a few long moments. “If it’s what you want, you should take it.”

Her expression clouded with confusion. “You want me to leave?”

Owen blinked. “No! God, of course, not.” He heaved a weary sigh.

Claire put the budget report down on the coffee table and crawled over to him, climbing into his lap, her legs bracketing his and her hands flat on his chest.

“Okay?” She drawled, watching him weigh his next words, not quite certain what brought this on. It had been a couple of weeks now, and ever since she told him at the park that moving was not on her agenda, he never brought it up again.

Owen shrugged, looking up at her. His hands instantly found their way to her waist, pulling her closer. “You’ve always said that coming here was a temporary thing,” he reminded her as if she hadn’t spent the past few months considering the exact same thing. “If there’s something else out there, something bigger—You don’t have to stay here. Not for me.”

She looked away, and he absently brushed her hair from her cheek, looping it around her hear. “So, when you freaked out about the idea of it…”

He groaned lowly in his throat. “Not about the _idea_ ,” he protested as his hands moved up her back, cradling her closer to him until she had no other choice but to look him in the eye. “I freaked out because I thought you were gonna up and leave without so much as a goodbye.” His voice dropped. “I didn’t want to lose you. Not again.”

“And now--” Claire tilted her head to the side, her eyes narrowed. Her fingers closed around a fistful of his shirt.

“If worse comes to worst, I can always come with,” he suggested lightly, albeit tentatively, waiting for her reaction. “If you want me to, that is.”

A smile spread across her face, so majestic he thought his heart would stop from looking at it, held captive by the sea-green of her eyes.

“Really?” She whispered, leaning closer to him, her face only a breath away from his, their noses almost touching, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. From this close, he could see every freckle sprinkling her nose – golden specs he couldn’t get enough of.

Owen laughed. “Really.”

His hands slid further up her back, tangling in her hair, framing her face. He dropped a kiss on the corner of her mouth before pressing his mouth fully to hers, cutting her off mid-giggle. And before they knew it, he was pulling her down with him, shifting to press more comfortably into the cushions.

Neither of them found out how the episode of _The Amazing Race_ ended.

\---

Zach’s 18th birthday was a messy occasion.

He insisted on celebrating it twice – on the actual day with the family, and then having a party with his friends the following weekend. Karen grumbled and huffed in frustration, mainly over the fact that Owen was the only one who was invited to both, but she gave in eventually, which Claire found hilarious beyond words.

“I just don’t get it,” Karen muttered, her brows pulled together as she ran her eyes down the grocery list, trying to decide if she forgot anything.

“Aw, come on! Like you wanted mom and dad at your 18th birthday party,” Claire laughed. “Even I wasn’t invited, if memory serves me right.”

“Yeah, but… That’s not the point!” She protested. “You were, like, in diapers.”

“I was 12,” Claire gasped in mock horror.

“And a tattletale,” Karen accused her.

“I was not!” Claire argued, and added, “Besides, Owen’s not coming. You can stop making a big deal out of it.” Karen leveled her with a skeptical gaze. “Trust me, spending a night with a bunch of teenagers is not exactly his idea of fun.”

“ _Please_ , tell me more about his ideas of fun,” she said flatly, and Claire giggled, traitorous colour rising up her cheeks. “And now I kinda wish he’d go.”

“Why?” Claire picked up an apple from the bowl on the counter and sank her teeth into it.

Her sister shrugged. “You know, to chaperone?”

Claire stared at her. “Have you _met_ Owen? If you get him to chaperone, someone would have to chaperone him.”  

Karen leaned toward her across the counter, studying Claire closely. “So, are you guys okay?”

Claire peered at her apple, unable to hold back a smile that was starting to feel like it had found a permanent residence on her face. “We’re… working on it,” she said.

It was odd, she had to admit that much. In a good way. The kind of way that didn’t make her want to pack up and leave and never look back. And the kind of way that made her stop waiting for _him_ to pack up and leave and never look back.

In the course of her adult like, there was more than one instance when Claire felt like she was racing parallel to everyone else, not among them, the sense of proud independence often mixed with profound loneliness. There was a balance to her life, she was sure of that, and, contrary to what her sister claimed sometimes, she would never deny the satisfaction of her academic and professional achievements that took over certain aspects of her relationships. However, for most of her life, intimate connections were something that Claire treated with caution and curiosity, like a project, or a jigsaw puzzle she needed to assemble in order to see the full picture, never with passion and abandon she used to expect of herself at some point. She watched those puzzles fall apart around her only to come back together for someone else, depicting another image entirely.

There was freedom and safety in being a silent observer, in staying on the periphery and watching the world unfold before her. She taught herself not to feel left out, alienated, consciously choosing calculated steps over plunging into the unknown.

A part of her expected her old life to disintegrate after the park, for Owen to walk off into the sunset with a cheeky grin and a promise of a soon return they’d both know he would never keep. With equal parts of dread and anticipation, she had started gathering the pieces she knew she’d have to put together and assemble into something new long before everything was really and truly over. Claire Dearing, thinking 10 steps ahead at all times, come hail or high water.

Not one part of her was prepared for the opposite, and for a girl with an itinerary on the first date and a solid five-year plan, this was like jumping into the water in the middle of the goddamn ocean. She had no other choice but to learn how to swim.

“You look happy,” Karen noted.

Claire’s face softened. “I am.”

She and Owen went shopping for gifts the following weekend (upon his insistence, too), and it quickly became apparent to Claire that he was disappointed to the core that Zach had already outgrown everything that could be purchased in a toy store, thus killing his chances to mess around with the LEGO dioramas and whatnot. She almost felt sorry for him, until they passed _Toys R Us_ and saw a three-foot tall skeleton of a T-Rex in the display window that made Claire take an involuntary step back, her breath hitching.

It looked surprisingly real, if somewhat undersized, and very detailed, too. And suddenly the noise of the mall and the never-ending buzz of conversations around them left her suffocating, her heartbeat spiking. Gray still had nearly a hundred dinosaur figurines in his room, as well as the books and a plushy toy of an Apatosaurus from when he was 5 sitting on the shelf. But this felt different somehow, scarier. It reminded her of all the things she never could predict or foresee, things that could drag her back to the very pit of a nightmare she’d barely found her way out of.

The boom of the voice in loudspeakers above her head, the sound of a decorative fountain thirty feet ahead of them, a child crying – Claire’s throat constricted in anticipation of a T-Rex stepping from around the corner, her mouth agape and her eyes hungry.

Owen’s fingers laced through hers, sure and steady and real, and he tugged her away from the store, out of the way of the Sunday afternoon crowds, squeezing her hand until she stopped seeing black spots dancing before her eyes like a reminder of how none of this was over yet. And if it all was going to go away some day, she was only halfway there still.

“What do you even get to a 18-year old?” She asked a while later when the blood rush in her ears receded and her breathing evened out. Staring at the digital map of the mall, her eyes scanned the names of the shops.

Owen leaned against it, watching her chew at her lip in concentration with undisclosed humor. “The guy’s getting a party where he’s gonna play beer-pond with a bunch of other kids, high on sugar and freedom, and then kill it in Doom until they all go cross-eyed. Trust me, nothing short of a car or, I don’t know, an unlimited credit card, will ever beat that.”

She turned to him, frowning. “Do you think Karen would mind--”

“Yes, she would.” He steered her toward Cinnabon, eyeing the displays with the hungry glee of a 10-year old.

“Wait, what was that about beer pong?”

In the end, Claire settled on concert tickets – for Zach and his guest of choice - and a small contribution to his college fund, which she knew Karen would appreciate. And Owen picked a video game box set containing, supposedly, the game itself and a few collectible items meant to leave anyone between the ages of 12 and 75 utterly ecstatic. And as she watched him choose it and pay for it, she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this was what she should get him for _his_ next birthday, the glee on his face so endearing she almost forgot about their earlier encounter with a plastic T-Rex.

“What?” Owen asked when he caught her amused look.

“Is this a gift for Zach or for Owen?” She smirked, an eyebrow arched.

He rolled his eyes and attempted to ruffle her hair jokingly, but Claire swatted him off, glaring daggers at him and promising him that he was _this_ close to being uninvited to her life, fully aware of it being the most blatant lie that ever came out of her mouth.

\---

A few days later, Claire woke up in the middle of the night with a searing pain spreading over her stomach, intense and burning, twisting her insides into a tight knot. Her first impulse was to blame it on escargot they ordered yesterday at this new place in town where Owen took her for dinner. But it wasn’t that. The pain was hot and pulsing, shooting through her in short, fiery jolts, so strong Claire couldn’t inhale properly, cold sweat beading on her skin.

“Owen,” she called quietly, panic in her voice morphing into a pained whimper.

He stirred behind her, warm and solid and safe, and for a moment, she almost believed that everything was going to be alright the way it always was with him around. And then another spasm ripped through her, making her nearly cry out in pain.

“Claire? Honey, what is--”

She gasped, curling in on herself, pressing her knees closer to her chest. Her breath was quick and shallow, her chest tight. Her fingers clutched a fistful of sheets in a desperate and futile attempt to keep the discomfort at bay.

Owen rolled out from under the covers in an instant, crouching near her side of the bed, his hands reaching for her hot, clammy face. He pulled the blanket off of her and let out a string of curses. She could feel it now too – sticky warmth on her thighs, the persistent tugs inside her growing more intense, the aftershocks merging into one another. For a moment, she thought she was going to be sick it was so intolerable.

“It hurts,” Claire whispered, squeezing her eyes shut, and pressing her face into the pillow. “Why does it hurt so bad?” She tried to hold her breath. Tried breathing as slowly as she could. But it felt like there was a write-hot ball of barbwire twisting and coiling inside of her, trying to scratch its way out, growing bigger with every passing moment. A low, terrified sob escaped her chest.  

“Claire, look at me,” Owen pushed her hair from her forehead that was covered in beads of sweat, his mind racing. There was blood on the sheets, so much blood, and her face contorted in pain… “Oh, god.”

“I’m scared.” She could feel tears on her cheeks now, unable to hold them back, her hand clasped around Owen’s, the other one clutching her stomach. He looked panicked and confused, and all she wanted to do was bury her face in his neck, for this agony to go away. Why wouldn’t he make it go away?

“Baby, stay with me. Come on,” Owen pleaded, turning her face up by her chin. “Claire, look at me. It’s going to be okay. You hear me? I swear to god it’s going to be fine.”

Her eyes were burning, her vision blurred. She could taste blood in her mouth from where she bit into her lip to stop herself from crying out so hard that the skin broke under her teeth.

“Claire?” Owen’s voice sounded muffled now, as if it was coming from far away. “Claire, please…”

**To be continued...**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sort of on a mission to finish my multi-chapters so let’s see how that goes. Have fun and let me know what you think! Feedback is always ❤♡


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